Court of Ghosts
by Pappillon
Summary: The day Green Diamond was born, Yellow and Blue seemed truly happy. (Sequel to Starlight! Please read that one first so this story makes sense.)
1. Chapter 1

The day Green Diamond was born, Yellow and Blue seemed truly happy. The pain had receded like eons falling from their faces as she howled with existence. Even in her first day, she was so verdant and teeming with life.

Yellow had become pregnant once Blue forgave her. After what had happened, after what White had done, after what she had lost, she spent so long holding back her tears. Yellow would find droplets on the equipment, water on the keypads, unconsciously dropped from her beautiful eyes.

Blue would visit, likely having finished crying about Pink Diamond, herself. She knew what it was like to lose someone in a pop of shards and be haunted by it.

In a state of freshly dried tears and newly choked sobs, Blue would hold Yellow, or Yellow would hold Blue. Eventually, they made Green, who grew like a flower in the garden of Yellow's womb. Blue would embrace her with such hunger, standing behind her, hands wrapped around her stomach. She wanted it to be hers, so perfect and global. She wanted Yellow's glow, radiating from her even in sorrow.

Those eyes of hers, even beneath the smear of ruined mascara, sparkled. She was beautiful, sobbing in jealous Blue's arms, weeping as she thought of her dead daughter, cursing what White had done.

They met that way countless times, laying in bed, weeping, passing out, making love. It was the same when Green was born. Blue held Yellow as she threw her head back in anguish and hollered. It had been so long; it was just like the first time, every moment as treacherous until Green cut the air with her own screaming and stole the show.

The right color this time, Blue brought her to Yellow, crying of happiness. Yellow did too. There wasn't a dry eye in the room.

They decorated her room with things they hadn't the first time, commissioned toys and a court of plush gems. They had books made for her, consisting of colorful pages and cute drawings.

Gifts surrounded Green as she unwrinkled in her crib. As her face became fuller and white hair sprouted from her head, the items multiplied. They replaced them when they fell apart. They gave her everything.

Yellow had taken time off to feed and hold her. She would sit in her chair in the corner of the room, stroking Green's soft little head as she cooed or screamed. It didn't matter. Yellow was there to comfort her, to sing to her, even though that was hard. As much as Green would cry, Yellow would too. Sometimes nothing would happen at all; they would only need to sit together and unconscious tears would manifest. There must have been so much in that deja vu, but Yellow fought her way through it because she's so, _so_ strong. She wanted to love again, and she did.

Green was such a thing of beauty that White tried to worm her way back in. She called their palace countless times to apologize, though she couldn't speak coherently. Yellow, generously, would answer, guarded, but listening, as Green babbled away in her arms. "Yellow, I'm—" then White's blubbering would start.

White would weep during the calls, but had started long before she selected Yellow's picture on her device. Choking, gagging, she would pull herself together only to make it seconds before falling apart again. She was always so dramatic about it, trying to appear presentable despite looking like a worn sack.

Yellow wouldn't tolerate this long, but when she did, she never let White realize her pity party. As if she's the one who deserves sympathy.

"Oh, Yellow. I can't rest. Even when I'm working, she haunts me. I'll never forgive myself. I'm so sorry—" she would start, pathetic as she hid her face in her hands. "I can't live with what I've done."

If she made it as far as, "I only dropped her," Yellow would hang up. She didn't want to hear it. No one did. It's doubtful White even wanted to say it, but no matter what she said, Yellow wouldn't allow her near Green. She protected that girl as if she were made of glass, cradling her in blankets, treating her like a treasure White was unfit to view.

It was Blue who suggested letting her in. Green was sitting on the floor between them, playing with her dolls, chatting to herself. Flowers had grown in her hair, because it was summer. Five-petalled, multi-colored blooms grew in polka dots atop her head, resembling a cap.

"You have every right to be angry with her," Blue started, "but don't you think White should see her? She'll grow up to be a part of the authority. Won't it be odd if they never talk?"

Yellow, in response, stared at Blue, but still listened because she's generous.

"She didn't do it on purpose," Blue continued, "and she feels terrible. She's felt terrible for decades." A pause. Yellow looked to Green. "I spoke to White and she promises not to pick her up. She said she wouldn't even touch her, if you prefer, but she does want to see her, at least. She said she loved St—"

"As if either of you ever cared!" Yellow shouted. Green gasped. "If White loved her, where was she the day she was born? Where was she when she was crying because her stomach hurt? Where was she when I sent pictures and no one, _neither of you_, had a word to say?!"

Green had started to cry, alarmed by Yellow's anger. Yellow opened and closed her mouth with words that never knew life, and hid her face. She was gorgeous even swallowing her tears.

"Oh, Yellow. She was shocked. We both were, but neither of us wanted what happened. She was such a sweet baby."

Blue had picked up Green and held her in a joint embrace.

"White told me she wanted to watch her grow, and teach her to sing, and tell her about our history. Now that she's no longer here, she wants to do these things for Green—"

"Please, stop."

"Mama," Green said, having calmed. "Don't cry."

Days later, she called White, and listened to everything. There was the typical bullshit about how sorry she was, what a mistake she had made, how if anyone was shattered it should have been her; boo hoo, but then she went on with, "Blue has shown me pictures and Green is so beautiful. I don't know what she's told you, but I'd love to meet her, I promise I won't touch her, but if I could see her in person, it would ease the pain. She looks like such a happy child. She must be so sweet." White gasped in more breath than she would ever need. "I thought we could go to the beach together, on Sigma 5. Perhaps the flowers in her hair would like some sun."

"Fine," Yellow said, "but I don't want you touching her."

"Thank you—"

She hung up. White's image tore from her office like a gem bursting on the floor.

They boarded one of White's enormous ships, built for pleasure. Like White herself, it was large and mostly useless. It had one room for the four of them to stand in, drift to the corners and stay away from one another. Perhaps she had thrown a party there once, during a time when she would leave her room more often. Now it was odd to see her there, the lack of guests only widening the gap between her and the others. White stood against the furthest wall, watching.

Green didn't notice her. Even when set down on her little legs, she focused so intensely on the passing stars and wide canvases of colorful space, she didn't notice the gigantic, weepy woman in the back. Green, hands on the window, said, "Mama, what's that?"

"Those are stars," Blue answered.

"What's that one?"

"That's a star too, but it's bigger than the others."

Green's breath fogged up the glass, she stood so close to it. White leaked tears in the background as no one paid her any mind.

Sigma 5 resembled a marble. Purple ocean in the south and peach sand in the north, it was all beach along the equator.

Green bounced with excitement up to putting her feet in the water, the others following. White trailed the furthest behind, even though she had brought gifts. As if that would make anything better. She carried them to where Green had sat and dug a hole, maintaining her distance. "Excuse me," she said above the waves, crashing louder than her resolve.

Yellow and Blue turned.

"I brought Green something. I was hoping she could open it."

The silver gift gleamed so brightly beneath the sun, she could use it to signal for help. Yellow and Blue squinted, but Green ran forward, too short to be affected.

Standing at White's feet, she didn't say a word. Her big, blue eyes were wide open and glimmering, looking at that absurd present. Slowly, White lowered it for her. She knelt into the sand, careful not to brush against Green. Her movements were deliberate, lagging with Yellow and Blue staring ceaselessly at her.

"This is for you," White said. "Will you open it?"

Green didn't answer, as she had caught White's gem, refracting a rainbow. Of course, no one told her that White was a baby killer. Green was captivated by White's overly black lips, by her ridiculous lashes, even though either of her mothers were easily more beautiful.

"Please."

After a pause, Green nodded. Hesitating at first, she tore apart the gaudy paper and unlidded the box. White had gifted her commissioned beach toys—a shovel for her tiny hand, a bucket for sandcastles, plastic flowers.

Without prompting, Green said, "Thank you!" and ran into White, hugging where she could. She caught all of one side, a skeletal arm. White nearly patted her on the head, but stopped herself. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Green had already run back to her mothers.

"That old Diamond gave me a bucket!"

Blue actually laughed, though she hadn't meant to, and they started a sandcastle as White stood. She never took a step closer, a fixture in the background.


	2. Chapter 2

Yellow forgave White. After letting her suffer for centuries, she relented, because she's reasonable. She and Blue spoke of it, in the privacy of their bedroom, in the dark. They had finished making love, holding each other as they caught their breaths, when Yellow said, "White wants to teach Green to sing." She whispered it, muffled by Blue's hair.

"How do you feel about that?"

"I don't know." Simultaneously, Yellow held her closer, but looked past her, at the wall. "You forgave me for Pink."

"That wasn't your fault."

Yellow didn't speak. The sound of their breathing grew louder, with nothing to stifle it. "I never should have trusted her. She didn't know how to care for a child—" Yellow cut herself off and swallowed. Blue squeezed her. "I know White didn't mean to do it."

"Of course she didn't."

"When she asked me, she sounded desperate. It's not like I want her to suffer."

"Green isn't so fragile anymore. I'm sure she'll be fine, for only a music lesson."

"I think so too."

The next day, Yellow contacted White, who covered her mouth to hide the wrinkles forming around it. Through her fingers, she scheduled Green's first music lesson. Soon after, Green walked through White's dusty palace of blank walls, following without Yellow far behind.

White kept glancing back at her, a treasure she had collected, finally delivered to her home. Perhaps she would have gathered dust too, if not for the fact that she would eventually have to leave. Still, Green looked happy, distracted by the absurd number of emotionless Pearls.

When they had finally reached the music room, Yellow left Green. She had to attend to her colonies. White, sitting before her floating keys, explained, "So much of a Diamond's power comes from her voice, which is why I'm glad Yellow has allowed me to teach you to sing." Here, another Diamond may have turned toward the instrument to play it, but White pressed a key in the bottom row without needing to touch it. The keys moved as if afflicted by ghosts.

It glowed bright purple and produced a tone near Green's speaking voice, a little high, but not difficult to reach. "Start by trying to sing this note. Do it how you like, but match the pitch."

Green, blushing beneath the silver hairs curling onto her cheeks, cleared her throat. She breathed in and what came out was a quiet, too-high sound, White's eyes on her the entire time.

"You needn't be shy. The note is right here. Like this." She pressed it again, and replicated it with her own voice. Frustratingly on pitch, her sound boomed, resonating against the walls.

"I can't sing it like that."

"Oh, darling! That's why we practice." White played the note. "Again."

Green did her best. She did her best through single notes, and then scales, and entire songs. She learned to listen to a jumble of notes and sing the average between them. She learned to fill her body with air and ration it. She learned to stop blushing when White challenged her with a new warm up. Green grew. Her voice became womanly. She developed Yellow's nose and the upturned versions of Blue's eyes, bordered by enviable lashes. She studied art, history, war, how to be a Diamond, and one day White took her from the lowest depth of her range to the highest, stopping on a set of notes it seemed no one could sing.

"Open up now. Remember to breathe." Green smiled and so did White, who played the notes again. "Ready?"

As Green breathed in to sing, suddenly, she choked. Instead of matching the notes, she spat on them, opening her mouth tall to eject a stone. Covered in saliva, it skidded to White's feet.

White took the mass, which contrasted against her hand, small and black.

"This isn't normal, is it?" White asked.

"No." Green shook her head. Her color drained.

White called Yellow, who called Blue, who made Green return home. They sat in a circle in the mainroom, the pebble taking center stage.

"You say you spat this out?" Yellow asked.

"Yeah, I opened my mouth to sing and then..."

"How do you feel now?"

Green regarded her feet. "Nervous, but not _abnormal_. It hurt coming out, but now I'm fine." She was pale, likely with worry.

Both Yellow and Blue glanced at each other. Yellow, breathing around a terse gasp, spoke first. "White didn't do anything to you, did she?"

Blue cringed, but didn't prevent Green from answering.

"Not that I remember. It was a normal lesson." Green leaned forward. "Why would she?"

"She wouldn't, Green," Blue said.

After a pause, Yellow took the pebble from the table, carrying it like something malignant, a cursed artifact. "I'll have this analyzed," she said. "Green, I'd like you to get some rest."

She rested for days at her mother's orders until the results came back. Laying under a mountain of blankets, she remained awake and verdant as ever. Both Blue and Yellow came in to speak to her and touch her forehead as though she were dying, but any heat was likely due to the blankets.

Three days in, it happened again. After a coughing fit, she spat another onto the floor, the same shape and consistency. Green, trying not to panic, set it onto her desk. She told Yellow and Blue of it later.

Yellow, the first to know, held it in the palm of her glove, looking from it to her daughter, until her words bubbled slowly, as if they, too, were pebbles caught in her throat. "How do you feel? Are you hurting?"

"No," Green said. "I feel okay."

"Alright," Yellow bordered between the room and the hall, "I'll send this to the lab too," and left.

But she didn't go to the lab, nor did she send the stone. Not then. Yellow made it as far as the main room before collapsing on the couch.

She visited the shards. In a little room, folded away, she has them on an altar with pictures posted on the walls. It hurts her, what happened; of course it does, but even in the modest light she produced, the broken pieces shimmered. They miss her, more than she realizes, just as she misses them, which she does realize, and swallows it.

In the privacy of her little shrine, to her dead little girl, Yellow can weep as hard as she likes. She doesn't have to appear so unaffected, so powerful. Her radiance floods when she's open. She hums like a star.

It turned off when she went out. Blue was calling for her, and saw immediately that Yellow had been crying. "What's wrong?"

Yellow opened her glove. Blue started crying too.

The lab's analysis didn't yield any results. They had broken down the pebble to molecules and atoms, only to discover that it wasn't a pebble, but organic matter. They couldn't discern its purpose, so it would sit unmoving, a stone.

Yellow and Blue, outside of running their empires, visited Green in her room. They would hold her hand, or stroke her hair, saddened by the prospect of yet another dead daughter.

"We're not sure what's going on with you," Yellow told her.

"You're such a special case that no one had seen such a thing before." Blue took Green's hand.

"How are you feeling today?"

Green, still beneath her blankets, sighed. "Pretty bored. I was hoping we would have an answer by now, and I missed my music lesson today. Maybe this is supposed to be happening? Maybe this is a power of mine, spitting up...organic matter?"

Blue began to cry. "Oh, _stars_, _my baby._"

Yellow took her hand. "How about an examination from a gemologist?"

"Okay, but please don't cry. I'm still here. If it's serious, it would probably take a while, wouldn't it?"

By then, both had embraced her.

That night, they allowed Green into the main room where a small, black machine projected images and narration. None seemed to pay attention. As the recording went on about an honorable Pearl serving her master, Yellow moved her focus to a faraway wall. Her pout, hidden beneath her hand, contorted and writhed.

Mercifully, no one asked what was wrong. Yellow wouldn't have to speak about the baby ghost living with her, always. It hurt her in ways she wouldn't admit.

Green awoke alone in the middle of the floor. Her mothers had left her, not wishing to disturb her as she slept. She had jerked upward, because her body had started with a terrible cough, and ejected yet another organic stone.

She panicked. Clasping a hand over her gem, she caught her breath as the story droned. Perhaps she worried that Blue or Yellow would materialize to stuff her back into bed. When they didn't, and the story continued, she walked quietly to the door, under the speaking voice. She stepped to each word of "Pearl brought tea to her lady," managing not to shake the room.

It must have been difficult, being stories tall and not making a sound, but Green went silently. Stone in hand, she traveled to the first floor of the palace, to the garden.

Every night, the rows of crystals glowed a gentle, electric blue, having absorbed the light of the sun earlier in the day. No one really maintained it, but sometimes a few gems might come to break up a vein to make them more appealing.

Cast in shadows and dull light, Green pushed the stone into the ground. To hide it, she patted soil atop the hole it made, and ascended to the top tier of the palace, to crawl back into bed.

The next morning, the gemologist was set to visit. From her room, Green could hear her mothers talking outside her door. The walls muffled their words, which seemed frantic. One or both struggled with catching her breath, voices growing quieter as they walked to the sofa in the main room.

When Green came out, Yellow hadn't moved. She sat, focused on nothing in particular.

"Mom?" Green said, which finally drew Yellow's attention, but under that solar flare of a gaze, whatever else she had planned to say evaporated. Like countless gems before her, Green was rendered speechless by her radiance, and then, by her sorrow. She likely wanted to say something. She normally would._ I know you're worried, but I doubt I'll end up like her. I don't feel like I'm dying. Please don't be sad._ But all Green could manage was, "I love you."

Green understood how to hold her. She squeezed Yellow, pressing her into the plush cushions of the couch. Yellow didn't speak. She held Green back like she had thousands of times. In a few hundred years, they might even be the same size. How excellent they would look next to each other. How wonderful it would be, to bask in Yellow's light.

Blue returned minutes later, smiling though she tried not to. Both Yellow and Green stared, holding their tongues as Blue set what she had behind her back onto the table. "I found this in the garden."

From the stone had sprouted a tiny leaf. Yellow and Green moved to examine it, squeezing each other's hands white. Taking it, Green gasped, "_It was a seed!_" and hugged her mothers. "I'm not sick! I made life!"

And they sighed in relief.


	3. Chapter 3

The first type of seed Green spat up grew miniatures of her. They created a plant-based servant, composed of leaves, vines, and the bark of trees.

She spat up others. A long and slender seed grew a tree which blossomed once a year, whose colorless flowers smelled sweet and delicate. There was a light brown circular seed that produced a tall tree, erupting with translucent yellow bulbs. They would glow in the dark, and Yellow engineered a way to convert their fluid into fuel.

They ran tests together once Yellow had seen them shimmering. Enthusiastically, Green brought a bag full of bulbs to the laboratory, even though Yellow had only requested a few. Spilling them onto the table, Green smiled so it hurt to look at her. Her lips had pressed dimples into her cheeks. Having no other choice, Yellow smiled back and gave her cheek a hard pinch.

Outside of lessons, Green tended to her plants. Sometimes one could even catch her with a notebook, studying White's misremembered facts about Homeworld's history as she watered plants scattered between crystals in the garden. She might lean over to bury seeds she had spit up that day, stored in a bag sectioned by shape and purpose. She might stop to write a note within Blue's law book, or sit outside writing an essay Yellow assigned her, oblivious to her mothers admiring her beauty.

They watched her, and the curves she had blossomed. Holding Blue's hand, Yellow said, "What are we going to do with her?"

Green bent over to plant a seed.

"I'm not sure," Blue answered. "I don't want her to have a colony. Not yet."

"No, but she should take some responsibility. She's almost…" Yellow trailed off.

"Grown?"

"Yes." They held hands more tightly as Green watered her plants.

"She needs her own proper garden. You know, it's almost her birthday."

"I'll talk to White," Yellow said. "I'm sure there's a space for her somewhere."

All it took was Yellow suggesting a personal garden for White to choose a space and begin building. Despite Homeworld's vast emptiness, they commissioned a house of glass with temperature and climate control, with rich soil imported from somewhere else, an irrigation system of tempered water, and on the southern wall, a stained-glass rendition of the Diamond insignia. The center, however, where all the points met, was green for her. They put it together in days.

"Oh, I want to celebrate her coming into our lives," White had said, before the unveiling. "Can't we show her tomorrow? I'm not sure I can wait a day longer."

Funny that someone that old could be so impatient.

"Well, it's ready, isn't it?" Yellow had said. "I don't see why not."

The next day, they blindfolded Green. The three of them warped with her between them, giggling behind her back.

She was nearly as tall as Blue. Before, the other Diamonds would tower over her, but they didn't seem so imposing now that she was one of them.

"Okay." White took her blindfold off, overgrown nails rending it apart in one calculated tear. "Open your eyes."

Green gasped. Taking a few steps forward, she clasped her hands together.

"It's only dirt now," Blue started.

"But we thought you could grow your plants for Homeworld," Yellow finished.

"I love it," Green said. "It's perfect!"

She ran into their collective embrace, bordered by Yellow and Blue, with White in the middle, as if she deserved the brunt of it. But it was easy to understand why they loved her so much. She eased their pain, making it as though nothing terrible had ever happened, no shattered Diamonds, no eons of mourning, no agony. They were perfect. Even the hag.

As if Green couldn't endear herself any more to them, she went on and said that she'd spend her days there, but she still wanted to study. "I'd be sad not to have a music lesson ever again. I even like writing the essays you give me, Mom. I understand if my schedule has to change, but—"

"Of course you can, Green." Blue kissed her on the forehead, with excruciating kindness.

"You'll have to stop eventually, but we'll keep teaching you, for now." Yellow touched her in the same place, roughly as she often gave her kisses, pride blinding.

So she kept learning and growing. She made energy for Homeworld. Given the deficit, it wasn't enough to replenish it, but she made a dent. Her doppelgangers helped, spending their few days alive harvesting bulbs and picking flowers, until she made new ones.

One day, she had an art class from a Peridot who had designed structures around Homeworld. Standing at the corner of her desk, nose in the air, she showed Green how to hold her pencil, how to draw lines and replicate shadows. She even looked like a posable figure, holding her arm out dramatically, as if she wanted Green to draw her.

She actually captured one of her plants. Hanging from her ceiling in a basket, its vines and leaves piled onto the floor.

Green would trim them sometimes. She was so careful when she cut the leaves, like styling hair. She would come out of her room with them, huddled into a pocket made of her dress by lifting the hem from the floor, the heart-shaped leaves bleeding clear yellow.

Blue had stolen one of them, when she caught her.

"They make great fertilizer," Green had told her. "They're full of nutrients."

She hadn't trimmed the plant in a while. Even the parts that didn't reach the floor had grown unruly, bursting and heavy from every angle. Fat and greedy, they drank up the sun and became fatter and greedier, great for drawing.

Once the Peridot had left, Green still sketched them. She kept trying to portray their plumpness, their weight, even though they came out consistently too thin. She restarted and erased so many times, it seemed she would tear the paper, then the lines underneath would sway her, and she ended up starving them, overshadowed and dark.

She'd been staring at those damn leaves for hours and kept making them wrong. Wasn't she frustrated? If asked to draw herself, she'd thin her fat little cheeks, drain the blush from them, hollow her face.

_Didn't she get it?_ It was right—

"Starlight?"

Green turned, staring onward with her round blue eyes. She seemed afraid. "Is that you?"

There was a noise, a stirring, a fizz in the ocean. It was so insignificant, but it seemed she could see it. My body couldn't make a sound. It vibrated, like plucked strings, but didn't expand outward. The flailing, my screaming, didn't help.

I grew desperate and disappeared.

"I thought I felt you."

_You did. I was right there._


	4. Chapter 4

I was sent to the scene of my death. It flooded back when Green said my name. No one had spoken about me in so long that I had been drifting, and landed at White's feet.

She was standing, glowing like a star. How obnoxious. I've seen her enter rooms strutting as she blinds everyone around her, as if they could admire her through the glare.

I spent a lot of time staring at her. We both seem equally still. I would follow her when she and Green would have their music lessons. I remember trying to press the keys. With nothing other than imaginary fingers, I couldn't make a sound. I tried to sing, but I don't have a body to carry a tune. I don't have anything.

But there are Pearls sometimes, who were shattered, whose pieces, like mine, remember their forms. They are projections. We would speak, and I recall one who was broken so badly, even her ghost manifested in pieces. I tried to hold her in my hands—my hands, which used to be small like Green's, but she slipped through. Once, she sobbed when I moved my fingers over her; I think because no one had shown her affection. That Pearl couldn't communicate with me, but I felt that she had been young too. She didn't know something—a rule, a faux-pas. White had stepped on her, her back broken along the shape of a heel.

That day, only White accompanied me in her colorless palace, unperturbed, blinking her emphasized lashes, clear of crime and dead children.

If I tried hard enough, I could wiggle something loose. I've pulled flowers from Green's hair. I've turned the pages of books. I've knocked over vases from the edge of table corners. I've rolled pencils along the floor.

Once I had even scared Green unintentionally by sending a ball to the other side of the room. Yellow and Blue had spoken about me, and I wanted to play with her. Instead, she ran screaming to Blue, who told her that there was a wind or a quake. Maybe her foot had touched it and she didn't notice. Anything other than spirits.

They tried so hard not to think of me.

White Diamond's cloak, glaring in her stubborn light, was rife with sequins and silver threads that looked easy to take. I secured one of them. It fell from my grasp when I drew it near, but I eventually loosened it, making it drop without a sound. It glinted on the floor, but White didn't notice.

I went for one of her beads, which were easier to grasp, but slippery. I tugged a few times, but it evaded my fingers, like fishing a Pearl from torrid water. I managed to tug upon her cloak, moving it toward me, only causing her to glance.

She couldn't have known, but we stared at each other before she looked away.

I grew bored and decided to search for Mother.

It's difficult for me to go where I like, but it can be done. This realm exists above reality, an invisible mist that clings to everything. I imagine it's what swimming feels like. I've seen Green do it, slowly moving through the thick waters of an ocean, or later, the pool they made for her. I progress slowly wherever I try to go, as if impeded by a lake. My form, light and nonexistent, struggled on its way to her, but I made it.

She was sitting on her throne, one leg crossed over the other, thinking. It was the aura around her, electric and humming like a machine. Even as I approached, her thoughts remained a mystery.

Oh, she was astounding in her austerity, gold like a beacon. I clung to her, though she threatened to blow me away. Her current rushed loudly in my ears. My semiconscious hands touched her for the first time in years, and I traced the bridge of her nose and counted her lashes, dark like the pupils of her eyes. I managed to brush the tips of my fingers past her plump lips and wondered if they would have mirrored themselves on my face. What would I take from her? I wanted everything.

Mother never noticed me. I've slid my fingers along the other Diamond's spines before and made them shiver. I've pulled their hair, and like drawing a curtain, gained their attention, but Mother never diverted from her screen. Dutifully, she worked, until accepting a call from Blue.

I draped my arms along her shoulders, her electricity buzzing in my teeth.

"What is it, Blue?"

"I wanted to ask you about the decorations. Flowers would be appropriate, don't you think, around the podium?"

"It sounds fine to me."

"Oh, Yellow. I could suggest anything and you'd give it your approval."

"No." She leaned back, closer to me. "Just because I'm not as passionate about the insignificant details doesn't mean I approve of everything. Flowers are fine; they suit her."

"What color?"

"Why don't you ask _her?_"

"She wouldn't answer when I called. I'm sure she's busy with the plants and couldn't hear the ringing. I decided I wanted to surprise her anyway."

Mother sighed through her nose. "What about blue, like her eyes?"

"A lovely idea."

"Has she written her speech yet?"

"I don't know, Yellow. I'm not sure she's had much time."

"I'll have to ask her. I meant to check up on her anyway. Thanks for the call, Blue." She hung up.

I'm sure on the other end, Blue was fuming. I had seen when Mother would hang up on her. She would gasp and clench her fists, but there was no time for sorry. Mother rose from her throne and brought me along, unbothered by my arms around her shoulders.

I traveled with her, attached like a child, as we went to the warp in the corner of the room, but I couldn't come with her. I had no light to transport. Once the flash had sent her, I lay flat upon the floor, alone with her Pearl, who stood at attention.

I wouldn't beat her to the garden, but perhaps I could catch her nearby when she finished speaking to Green.

That must seem insane. If I waited long enough, she would return to her throne room, where I could drape myself over her again, a cloak. But I didn't want to be without her, so I walked into the long halls of the palace, into the streets where gems rushed about. Each passed in blue or yellow uniforms. I walked amongst buildings that would have towered above me, and those I would tower above, until the expanse of sand where the glass house gleamed, a shard glaring in the desert.

It didn't take long to arrive. I found currents that pushed me along until I slipped through the wall to her neat rows of plants. Their leaves blushed with youth and fullness as they stood perfect distances from one another. Her doubles walked by, watering them, trimming them, and harvesting their fruit and flowers.

I didn't spot Green or Mother, until a flash of gold entered the hall leading to the fountain, which provided water for the plants. The world had begun to blur. I had spent too much energy coming to that place, but I caught up with Mother, standing before the fountain.

"Green?" she called, but only the ambient noise replied. It was meant to go on forever, like the Diamonds, an endless song that changes chords every once in a while.

The room itself remained in darkness as the fountain's water whispered over it. A statue of Green resided in the center, but she made no real appearance. Beneath that was the pool. Not made for swimming, its deep waters nourished Green's plants, leading to a spout in the garden the giants took from.

I looped my arms around mother's ribcage as we searched the room, waiting as though Green would come. After only a moment, however, she escaped to the warp and left me flat upon the floor. I called after her, but had no voice. I was too tired to follow.

Facing the fountain was like sleeping. The room was dark enough with that pleasant, ongoing sound. I almost closed my eyes, but when I came close, the water bubbled and Green stuck her head out. She filled her lungs with a violent breath, but didn't leave the pool, checking first around the corner, into the hall.

When no one came, she pulled herself out, cautiously repelling the water. She walked silently from the room, looking both ways, and then hurried past me into the garden.

I disappeared, too angry to stay.


	5. Chapter 5

I found Green next in the hag's palace, taking a music lesson. I awoke there, sloshed by the ether, and propped myself against the wall. Green came in, potted plant in hand.

She set it on the floor and hugged White.

"How are you doing, my blossom?" She couldn't make those words sound sweet no matter how she said them.

"I'm well." They kissed each other on the cheeks before Green reclaimed her spot. "It's been so busy, getting ready for the ceremony."

"_Are_ you ready?" White played a few keys.

"No," Green said, smiling.

They began with their warm-ups, White playing notes for Green to match. They had grown more complicated since I had watched her consciously, as she slid her voice along scales without any notes under her. White would play them and Green would remember, projecting her sound. I could feel it inside my body; I captured it like an empty jar, vibrating between my ribs.

Her voice had developed so beautifully, a wind ripe with flowers. Listening to her ascend into the higher notes, she pulled something loose in me; my heart bent toward her, as if she had grasped it by a string and pulled it taut. She flourished, and for a moment, I felt flowers grow in my hair too.

Then the hag cut in. "Now, let's practice the anthem, shall we? It seems you're ready to sing it before a crowd, but it needs to be perfect, wouldn't you agree?" She grinned through every word, only looking away to play the overture.

Green cleared her throat and sang.

I remember when she learned the anthem. It might have been her first song. White sang it to her, classically, moving her arms like a diva, sound swelling from her like an odor she had waited centuries to release. Of course, Green looked amazed. Why wouldn't she? It was written to be objectively impressive, in an old tongue none could understand. The sheet music used characters no longer written, but the old woman went through and gregariously translated each line, first speaking the original versions, as if Green wasn't impressed enough.

_By Homeworld's guiding light, we shine._

I can't remember what the song means. No one has had it translated before me in a long time, but Green sang it as though she felt and understood every word. She likely did. It was about her. About all of them.

Performatively, she spread her arms too. White, playing the notes beneath her, grinning all the while. Perhaps she was pretending to be her audience. Whenever she would perform this piece, thousands of gems were bound to gawk.

The song ended with a lengthy note that Green carried beautifully. The plant, still in the corner, burst into bloom, flowers popping open. The entirety of the little tree's branches had turned a gentle blue. Its limbs, both thin and outstretched, held bunches of flowers. The air around it adopted its mild perfume as the blooms finished opening.

"Well done," White said, "They won't be able to handle you during the ceremony when you show them your abilities." She fluttered her lashes, trying to be cute. "Once more and I'll release you."

Green sang the anthem again, glowing. Her smile-bent mouth prevented her from singing it as perfectly as the first time, but it didn't matter; the tree wouldn't bloom a second time.

As the second finale faded, White turned off the instrument and stood. "Practice once more for tomorrow. I'll see you at the same time."

"Thank you, White," Green embraced her again, took the plant, and left the room. I followed, pulled along by a root she had planted in my chest. Not that it was all that difficult. I would rather be dropped and shattered again than stay in that room alone with the hag.

If Green felt me drape my arms around her, she didn't acknowledge it. I usually manifest as nothing more than a muscle ache.

I whispered into her ear, "Can you hear me?"

She couldn't.

We walked together outside, where the sun sank along the horizon. Homeworld, with its dusty skies and barren lands, still had colorful sunsets, projecting rosy pink and golden orange across the sky and onto both of us. Even the fog and grime adopted a handsome purple as we walked amongst the streets, gasped at and bowed to by any passing gem.

Perhaps she felt me and mercifully decided to walk us to the palace, but I suspect she wished to be outside.

We arrived as the night infected the horizon, ascending the stairs to reach her room on the second floor. The palace had updated Green's paintings, depicting her as the young woman dragging me along, usually in a golden frame between Mother and Blue. There were photographs as well, which served as a timeline from her infancy, beginning at the base of the staircase to the top.

I was distracted, looking for pictures of me I never found. Mother waiting for her caught me off guard.

"How did practice go?"

"Oh! It went well. The tree bloomed nicely." They hesitated. Green stood only a step from the top floor as Mother impeded her, resplendent as she crossed her arms. Oh, she commanded such a presence!

"Have you written your speech?"

Green sighed. "No."

"Well, draft one. I know seven cycles seems long, but you're going to be so busy, it will pass in an instant. I need to proofread it." Mother paused, looking at us, unwavering.

"I guess I'm just struggling, figuring out what to say."

"Nonsense. You're good with words." She came closer to kiss Green on the forehead. As she drew near, I leaned over her shoulder to kiss Mother's cheek. "Begin writing and the words will come."

"Did you visit just to tell me that? Every time I see you, you're always working on something."

"I did," Mother walked past us. "Oh, before I forget," she turned and we stood practically face to face. I kissed her again, on the high point of her cheek, but she didn't feel me. "Your mother and I have picked out blue flowers for extra decoration, to match your eyes. We wanted to ask you, but for _some_ reason, you made yourself difficult to reach."

"Sounds great."

"Good," Mother turned. "Now get to work." She went quickly downstairs.

I couldn't have caught up with her no matter how I tried. She was warping away from me again, but at least I had touched her. My entity must have glowed with a particular joy, which Green ruined by muttering, "So she really did come to sneak up on me."

I nearly strangled her as she brought me into her room, screaming as she practiced her song. After singing it five times and making her vines grow, she lay in her bed for a nap before drafting a single word. I wished to kill her.


	6. Chapter 6

Green dreamt of her miniatures—toys gifted to her by White. She was playing with them at the bottom of her pool, a bedroom scene underwater.

There was a small blue bed, a dresser whose doors wouldn't open, a bookshelf whose volumes wouldn't slide out. To inject some realism, spaces were made between them, like missing teeth. Perhaps a gem could have used them, if they were real. White could have gifted her things a noble might have in her home, but as it stood, these items only existed to be admired. She wasn't to play with them any longer.

I yelled at her, "Why don't you write your speech? Why did you hide from her?"

Slowly, with bubbles escaping her lips, Green looked up. She didn't even look _up_, but right at me. I can't tell you all the times I've screamed, or pulled a lock of hair, only to receive a glance—and for a moment, my boundaries would hum. Eureka! Acknowledgement! But something else always captivated them. It was never me. Yet Green and I stared right at each other. She saw me and pinned me in place.

"Hey, Starlight!" she said. Our voices traveled so normally, in the depths of the pool. "Oh, wow, you look so much like her—"

My anger tried to escape, like the air draining from our mouths; she was dodging my questions. "You didn't answer me," I said. "Why don't you write your speech?"

My voice was notes lower than hers.

"I don't know." She took my hand. "It's hard to think of something you have to tell everyone."

We ended up sitting amongst her miniatures: toy Pearls one of us imagined sleeping in the bed, or standing near the bookshelf, selecting a title. She held one of them, a flower atop its head, eyes closed cutely with painted lashes.

"What is being a ghost like?"

"Inconvenient."

Green hardly blinked.

I felt odd receiving so much attention. "I don't have a lot of control where I go or what I see. Sometimes I drift through the past and wake up in the present. Sometimes I can touch others and they feel me, other times they don't." Those blue eyes of hers hadn't left me. I lost my train of thought. "What is being a girl like?"

"Troublesome. Everyone wants something from me." She traced the flower in the faux Pearl's hair. "But it's nice too. It feels good to sit at the bottom of the pool or plant my seeds and watch them grow."

"It must be nice to talk."

"What do you mean?" She touched my hand. "We're talking right now."

"No—I mean—" I sounded desperate, loud. "I mean, to be able to talk to anyone—to look at another gem and know that they can hear you—you can tell—" I choked. "You can tell your mothers how much you love them—" Despite the pool, I had started to cry. I couldn't feel the tears, but I had seen Green do it when she was frustrated, when she hurt. I faltered the way she did, how Mother did, when she would think of—

"I could tell them." Green held the tips of my fingers, tracing her thumb over my nails. "I could tell them anything you want."

"Just Mother—" I managed. "Only Yellow."

"What should I say?"

"That I love her and—and that she's beautiful—and—" I paused, "and that I wish I could hug her, the way you can."

"Okay," Green said. "I'll tell her."

"Thank you."

We sat a while longer. From the surface of the water, the light made its way along the bottom of the pool. It wasn't clear whether it was a moon or the sun, but reacting to whatever it was, Green's summer flowers sprouted. I watched as they grew from buds to blossoms, and fell to the pool floor from her scalp. It smelled of the treatment her Peridots used to help the plants grow.

I couldn't believe that neither of us had spoken for so long, but when I turned to say something, the water had upset. The tile flooring had cracked, and the pool filled with air and bubbles, as though it were boiling.

I reached out to touch her, asking, "What's wrong?" but she had expelled me within a moment, and I slammed against one of her bedroom walls. Despite how it hurt, my impact didn't disrupt the quiet night.

A coughing fit had woken her. She jolted out of bed, violently expelling a seed into her open palm.

She didn't utter a word, but those piercing eyes of hers had found me. Like in her dream, we stared at each other until she placed the seed, round and white, on her nightstand.

"You'll tell her, right?" I asked, but my voice didn't have a stake in reality, soft as a breeze passing through a field.

The saliva on the seed had dried, and Green slept, but I couldn't contact her. I don't think she dreamed.

I stayed with her until she woke the next morning, too exhausted to travel.

She stretched when rising from her bed, popping her limbs. I watched as she yawned and occupied the mirror of her vanity, putting on her shoulder pads and adjusting the curls at her cheeks.

At certain angles, she would look so much like Mother. Perhaps it was the plumpness of her lips or the cut of her nose. Sometimes it was the way she carried herself, crossing her arms. Some things were her. The flowers were one. The way she smiled was another. She was uninhibited unlike the others.

I draped myself along her shoulders before she left the mirror, and noticed as she stuck her tongue out as far as she could between a smirk. That was another.

I wondered what would have been uniquely my own as she took me into the hall.

That morning, they were setting the stage where she would give her speech, a collective of white Pearls having come to decorate. Rather than posting _real_ flowers, however, they came armed with baskets of paper ones, folded meticulously by their small hands.

"We're setting these as an example," Blue told her. "We were hoping you could grow the rest yourself, or at least have your Peridots help." She touched Green's shoulder. "How did you sleep?"

"Well, but I had a strange dream I wanted to tell Mom about."

"Not _this_ mom?"

Green laughed. "I could tell you. It's just—" Some of the glow left her face. "Well. It was about Starlight."

"_Starlight?_"

"Yeah…"

It grew quiet between them—not even them, the entire arena, as though a dust storm raged through. In the silence, my body grew an outline. Perhaps if someone mentioned me again, I could see my hands and what color they are; I could make out the pointed nails I know I have.

I held to Green more tightly.

"Well," Blue said, "Perhaps there's a reason for this. Did she seem…angry?"

"No—well, maybe a little. But she seemed...sad." Green pursed her lips. "She wanted me to tell Mom that she loves her."

_And that she's beautiful. And that I wish I could hold her_.

"How odd that you would have such a dream. I suppose you should tell Yellow."

"I want to. Where is—"

The doors swung open. She had arrived. Her frustration appeared within the crease of her brows and the ozone wafting around her. Mother would never be late, not even for preliminary decorating. Something held her back, something wrong with one of her colonies, someone fucking up.

"Mom!" Green went to her. "How are—"

"I'm sorry I'm late, Green. One of my ships exploded. The matter compressor malfunctioned. Fortunately no one was hurt, but my gems aren't being forthcoming with the truth. _Shocking_." She rolled her eyes. I love her. "Please tell me you've written your speech."

Green didn't answer.

"Well?"

"I—"

"If you don't have it done the next time I see you, I'm going to be upset. Don't let that happen." Yellow had started to walk toward Blue.

"Mom, wait! I wanted to tell you something."

"You managed an outline?"

"What? No—"

"Then _what?_"

Mother was unwavering with her arms firmly crossed. Oh, I wish I had added that I would never disobey her, that if she asked me to write a speech, I would do it in a heartbeat. For her I would write ten, fifteen, five hundred speeches. But Green couldn't remember all of that.

"I had a dream of Starlight last night."

"_Please_, Green! I don't have time for _dreams._"

"Wait! Would you just listen? She wanted me to tell you that she loves you, and that—" She faltered. _Come on_. "That she wishes she could hug you."

Mother looked at Green skeptically. She looked at _us_ skeptically. From what Green had said, I felt myself coming back. The borders of myself grew a milky color, too pale for my liking, but not unsurprising.

"Next time," Mother started. _Oh stars_. "You had better dream up the body of your speech."

She left us. I flopped onto the floor.

In the rage and disappointment, I ripped away a few paper flowers. They were already loose, but I tore them free for the Pearls to place again. I don't remember what happened afterward, but I ended up elsewhere, hollering.

I would have to try again. I would make her believe in me. I would make her love me.


	7. Chapter 7

I'm pulled out of the void by Mother's voice. Sometimes it comes in static waves that push me along. Then my foot catches a corner. My shoulder collides with a wall and I open my eyes to somewhere else, some _time _else, watching. There could be a noise, a chattering, and I find myself in the midst of a scene.

"You lied to us, Green."

Green had curled herself into a ball on the floor, adolescent, knees drawn inward. Her sniffling provided background noise to Mother's words, which must have felt like shots from a gun—sharp bullets tearing into her skin.

I hated to see Mother displeased.

"You said you had finished your research on that planet. What if we had sent a group of gems there? What if there was something dangerous lurking on its surface? You took _one _look at its topography and fabricated an entire ecosystem! It would have been easier to do the work as we had _asked _."

Green coiled further into herself, cries growing louder. She became inconsolable, face contorting with her mouth open, damp and pathetic.

"Yellow," Blue, ever the enabler, placed her hand upon Mother's shoulder. "It's a normal mistake. She made assumptions that turned out to be incorrect—"

" _Tell that to the gems who would have lost their lives! _" Mother caused me to jump. Like Green, I felt tears budding in my eyes. "There's no room for recklessness _or _laziness as a Diamond! You can _damn _well bet that I won't allow her to turn out like Pink." She took Green by the wrist.

She stopped bumbling, and gave Mother wide and pinkened eyes.

"One day you'll have thousands of gems who depend on you. _Take that seriously. _"

Mother left and Green began crying again, prompting Blue to hold her, stroking her hair. Even though she fucked up.

They would love her no matter what she did.

The scene washed away. It folded along the edges first, then turned into long coils of static absorbed by the vacuum of the void. Blue and Green came apart that way. Holding each other eternally, their colors shifted to black and white, and became another patch of this ocean I drift through. I was moving forward in time yet again, facsimiles of their faces drifting toward me in radio silence.

_She's always so difficult _.

I awoke inside Green's dream.

This time we were in her room, floor overgrown with pink flowers. They sprouted from the vines cradled in the basket, hanging from her ceiling. In a way, I felt as though we were standing atop a branch of a spring tree, sturdy enough to hold us both. Perhaps I would drop through the holes. My presence spills like water through the cracks of a cup.

" _Mother didn't believe you! _Maybe if you had written your speech, she would have been more receptive!" I didn't mean to yell, but yelled anyway.

She sat on the floor, buried by the flowers. "Hey, Starlight."

"Don't you 'hey Starlight' me! I've come for answers! _What do you have to say for yourself? _"

"I mean," Green gazed to the other side of the room, past the border of its wall, extending to another branch of flowers. "She doesn't usually take dreams seriously."

"Maybe she would have!" I hollered. The plants around my feet drained of their colors, wilting a sickly grey. "You have no idea how lucky you are! If I were alive, I would do anything she asked of me without question! But look at you! You're in your room, _sleeping! _"

Green tilted her head and I teetered on the verge of tears. She felt sorry for me, and my spine rang like a cluster of bells in the unbroken beam of her sympathy.

"Starlight," she said.

I sat next to her, the space around me turning grey.

"I could try telling her again after I write my speech. But you might have better luck if you contact her yourself. Maybe you could get through to her. You got through to me."

It had begun to rain. Droplets bled through the ceiling and pattered onto our heads, softly at first, then with lightning and the clatter of thunder as it grew heavier.

Green imagined boundaries for me. The water hit and rolled along my arms, shoulders, my face.

"That would never work. Her aura is much stronger than yours, and she doesn't sleep."

"She does. Sometimes after working days in a row, she'll nod off in her control room. She might believe it if she sees you for herself."

"Okay," I said. I could feel myself sink into the roots, into the floorboards. The dead flowers started to give. "Will you try again, in the meantime?" Lower. "Will you tell her that I love her?"

"Of course."

I spilled through the faults in her dream, becoming like the rain I had started, washing away somewhere else.


	8. Chapter 8

I found myself yet again in the hag's palace, in the middle of the night. Fortunately, she was nowhere to be found, the throne room dark without her unending, obnoxious light.

Despite the darkness, I could see everything. Waves of ghostly energy from me, or the countless Pearls she's disposed of, passing like disembodied lanterns. Flames drifted as though they could catch on the paintings, or the drapes, or the rugs, but never burned the place down. A few dangled above me, fixated in their movements, illuminating the portrait's faces in a circular pattern. First White, then Blue, then Mother, and me. She had hung my pictures among them, blown-up versions from Mother's device. She didn't mind how they stretched, my face blurred from the transition. Paintings existed from these photographs as well. They smoothed out my dusty blond hair and added details to my eyes and face one couldn't see in the original. I hated to look at them.

I felt tiny hands against my arm.

"You've grown," Celeste said.

I turned to her, and touched her with the tips of my fingers. We phased through each other.

"Do you remember when we would play together? You used to hide yourself within the curtains, but I can't imagine you doing such a thing now, My Diamond."

I smoothed over her head.

"Where have you been?"

"They forgot about me. You know how it is."

"No!" She held my finger with both hands. "Every time she yells 'Pearl' we all snap back to life, like a strike of lightning. I suppose it helps that she named us all the same. Nothing changes around here." She smiled. "Well, come along, My Diamond. Best not to lie around. I'm sure everyone else will want to see you."

"I have to go to Mother," I told her. "I can't stay for long."

"Just for a moment, My Diamond." We were walking to the salon. "Just a visit."

White's palace had hardly changed. Gaudy portraits lined the walls; her opulent, silver-plated furniture and glowing chandeliers obliterated the shadows. I walked with her across rugs designed like tapestries, depicting her own self-important creation, or the subjugation of her first colony, or all the worlds she owned, spilled over the fabric as if dropped and rolled. The palace smelled of dust and expired perfume.

I found additional green pigments amongst all the white, gold, and blue. Small portraits of her, pressing through the walls where she could, growing between the other frames like playful vines. Sometimes a rare photograph appeared. I caught one that the hag must have taken, of Green standing next to the instrument. Perhaps she had hit her highest note on that day. She was unbearably happy.

We entered the salon. The Pearls, who had gathered in the center of its enormous rug, turned to me. "My Diamond!" Each of their voices erupted like a chorus of flowers opening.

They arrived before me. Some sprang while others stopped and stared, but I leaned over to try and hold them all. "It's been so long." I contained them loosely in the loop I made of my arms. "I've missed you."

"You look so different, My Diamond."

"You've become so tall."

"And so radiant."

"Thank you, Pearls."

We used to play together after White would call Mother sobbing. I would sit in her throne room as her sentiment spilled, raining over me like a life-giving sludge. The Pearls would sit around me, waiting, laughing. Once the call had ended and White had set her face inside her manicured hands, we sprang to life and went to rip the books from the shelves.

They resembled a collection of fashion dolls, each with the same features, but wearing outfits from different periods, centuries apart. Aside from their outfits, styled by the largeness of their sleeves and lengths of their skirts, I could recognize them by their cracks. There was Celeste, broken straight down the center with her puffy sleeves, and Stella, whose face was unscathed, but whose stomach broke apart six different ways at its epicenter. There was Stardust and Moonbeam, identical bows around their waists, who were shattered at opposite left and right shoulders. There was Lily, whose legs were broken beneath her long skirts, and Diva who, despite her ornate costume, was missing an eye. There was Blush, who dressed modestly and spent her time in the library, face bisected.

"But where is...?"

At once, all of them turned to indicate the ruined Pearl, who couldn't leap up. Dressed always in her ancient clothes, she lay upon the palace floor, milky blue eyes pointed at me.

Even as a ghost, she struggled to breathe. The air moved through her the way it would a holey bag, escaping through the gaps of her dress. On the others, I could make out their arms and legs, see their boundaries. But for her, she lay flat in the middle, where that bitch had crushed her. Her outfit lay over her, a sheet atop a crime scene.

"I was telling her a story, Madame," one Pearl told me.

"That's kind of you."

I kneeled at her side. The others swarmed around me. They watched as I touched the ruined Pearl with the tip of my finger. She always seemed to appreciate when I stroked over the top of her head, listening as I would tell her of the pranks we pulled. She would close her eyes and sometimes mouth out a word. I could never understand what she was saying, no matter how I tried.

"Will you play a game with us today, My Diamond?" another Pearl asked.

"Will you tell us a story too?"

"We were planning to pull down one of White's curtains."

"Or steal a trinket from her room."

"You've grown so much now."

"You could help."

I could feel them crowding my feet, tiny hands clutching theoretical shoes.

"I would love to." They cheered and I kept stroking the Pearl's head. She had closed her eyes, tears bubbling, crying like a steaming kettle. "But I have to visit Mother today. I want to talk to her."

A symphony of disappointment and a single boo.

"Please, My Diamond?"

"Yes, please?"

"I can't now, but later. I promise."

They whined again, albeit less passionately, and I lowered myself to hug them goodbye. They latched onto my ears, chin, nose, and lips, afflicting me with tiny kisses where they could reach. I felt their hands along my neck as they tried to hang on, arms phasing through me.

They hollered goodbye from the lip of the salon and I traveled to Mother in the dawn.

Homeworld bustled with activity as I moved through crowds of gems, heading toward their stations or beginning their assignments. I was large and slow around them, squadrons of Rubies running through me like a transparent sheet, or busy Pearls gracefully heading past. They ran through my shoes, my skirts, a Topaz fusion through my ankle.

I found several trapped ghosts: an invisible Ruby running in time with her squadron, a broken Peridot sitting outside her laboratory, a lost Pearl following her master. When they saw me coming, a fixture as large as the statues and buildings, they saluted me, gasped in shock, and whispered, _My Diamond_. For a time, everyone had known of me; they had seen Mother's pregnant belly and witnessed me in her arms, but now I was a rumor.

I witnessed gems huddling inside the shadows of buildings. They hid their mouths beneath their hands, muffling their laughter as they gossiped. I was tempted to lean over and hear about whom they spoke, their secrets, their hidden lives, but I kept moving. I needed to see Mother more.

When I phased through her simple but beautiful double doors, the atmosphere filled with the current of her electricity. The teeth-rattling sensation of her aura awoke me in ways I had forgotten. Her lightning, potent paces away, illuminated my body, as though I had circuits for her to light. For a moment, I lived.

She sat nobly in her throne, back straightened as she checked on her colonies. She pulled them into question one by one, took notes, sent messages to her overseers. I drew closer.

I stood near enough to look at her statistics, but found myself more entranced by her face, reading her features as though they were the poetry eloquent enough to describe her. Her own eyes, nose, and mouth spoke for themselves. I traced the outline of her jaw with the blade of my finger. Even at such slight contact, I felt electrocuted, my hair catching fire. It hurt but I wouldn't pull myself away. My false heart beat. That was a priceless sensation.

I kissed her cheek and touched her shoulders, but Mother didn't notice. She kept working, unencumbered, typing, commanding, ruling.

I wrapped my arms around her legs. She warmed me like a generator. In that position, I waited for her to doze off, impossible as it seemed. I had to hope that Green had told the truth.

At one point, she stood to leave. She returned. She told Pearl to take a dictation. She wrote to one of her fleet captains to inspect the surface of a colony. She sent them probes and drop ships. She sent Peridots to rebuild a machine in the central technology bay. She watched their progress. She called Blue.

"Have we decided the instruments for the ceremony?"

Yes.

The lights flickered, threatening a power outage. I wondered if Green was harvesting bulbs.

Mother worked for hours and hours, for days, tending to her control panel, occasionally leaving the planet, standing to stretch her legs. Whenever she took a short walk, I would follow, latched to her shoulders. Being so close to her, I heard the interruptions in her veins, a chink in her lightning, her joints cracking. Her aches were mine. I wished for a way to assist her. Instead I settled on kissing behind her ear and whispering, "You work so hard, Mother. You're so strong."

She worked such a long time without a break. I might have given up hope, but her aura—formidable when I came to her—started to disintegrate. Not that I minded waiting. I cherished every moment in Mother's presence, but I could feel her fading. I kept reminding myself that she might sleep soon.

Suddenly, I looked up and found her eyes closed, her chin dipping down. For short seconds, her electricity would rescind. My heart would stop, but then, I could practically slip inside of her. Her forcefield no longer repelled me.

Whenever I came close, however, her eyes would snap open and she would throw me back, a mild electrocution. Mother might answer a message, give her Pearl an errand, but soon enough, her eyes had shut again. No longer righting herself, she leaned, her lightning receded, and I slipped from the tips of her fingers into her mind.

It took several tries. Each time she repelled me, she grew weaker. It hurt less to be launched across the room, and I drew closer to her consciousness, glowing like a beacon.

Finally, on the fifth attempt, I entered. Mother didn't wake, so I remained, safe and warm, enveloped inside her. Her heat provided me with elation, knowing that I was with her, even in the darkness of her rest, before the dream began and caused my specter to hum.

I wondered for a time until a honey light spilled into my blackness. It was shaped around a doorframe, a cooing echoing, and then a voice—_her sweet voice_—speaking.

"You're a little empress, aren't you, telling everyone what to do?"

I entered on the beat of a playful scream and found Mother holding a tiny blond girl, kicking her legs. They sat inside a rocking chair—the one pictured around my altar of shards.

The baby shouted, resting a gloved hand on Mother's arm.

"I know. She's late. I'm sure she'll be here soon and then we can get on with more important matters." Seeing her there, holding _me_, I choked back a sob. She remembered me fondly, cradled carefully in her arms, her speaking so kindly, the way she would stroke my hair, such a light gold then—

My choking drew her attention. Her stare flashed like a sword leaving its sheath.

"Are you just going to stand there or do you intend to start painting?"

I wiped my eyes. "Painting?"

"I commissioned a portrait of my daughter and me, or did you forget?" She pointed to an easel standing near the bookshelf across the room. I found brushes slotted between my fingers, and a basket of paint in one hand.

"Oh, of course—right away."

Even hypothetically, I had never painted. I think I had seen Green attempt it once, but she knew about as much as I did, with my materials scattered about the easel and the floor. Mother paid no mind. She righted herself, adjusted the girl in her arms, and said, "Starlight probably won't sit very still. You'll have to do your best."

"Of course, My Diamond." I fought the tears to find the golden paint and a brush. Without my needing to pour it, the bristles filled with the pigment, and as I touched it to the canvas, the strict angles of her hair appeared. I barely had to move my hand, yet I checked back and forth between Mother and the painting. I pretended to record her features, although I relished being across from her, in the same plane of existence, in the grace of her stare. _She had even said my name_.

"Why are you crying?" she asked. The Starlight within her arms had closed her eyes and stilled.

I painted the frame of Mother's face.

"It's—it's such an honor to meet you, My Diamond." Her plump lips. "I've admired you from afar for so long." Her perfect nose. "I see you, traveling between tasks, sitting in your control room chair—" Her intense eyes. "I've always wanted to tell you how delightful it is to be yours, My Diamond."

Mother adjusted herself again. Her baby, snoring soundly in her arms, breathed more quietly. "I appreciate that you feel that way. I wish all the members of my court could be so loyal."

"You could ask me any task, and I would see to its completion."

"In that case, make certain that this painting comes out well. I've seen versions of myself that aren't exactly flattering. Starlight would hate to have you start over."

"Understood, My Diamond."

I kept painting. Mother didn't notice that the girl in her arms had stopped breathing, or that the slight glow emitting from her skin had extinguished. She had become like a doll, perfectly behaved as she no longer kicked or chattered.

I stared at her gem.

"What are your aspirations for her, My Diamond?" The question hurt like spitting up a dagger. "What do you want her to be?"

"Isn't the answer obvious? She's a _Diamond_. By the way she hollers, she'll make a great leader one day. Anyone could tell you _that_."

I stopped painting. Starlight had halted to a rag doll, fraying thread and filled with ash. I had only recorded Mother with her arms shaping a cradle, holding no one.

"Oh, _stars_. Why are you crying again?"

"I—she loves you, My Diamond. She'll belong to you forever. She'll never forget—"

I didn't finish. I couldn't remember what I had wanted to say, but for the first time during our session, she stared directly into my eyes. I must have kept my pupils, pointed like hers, but white inside pale yellow irises. If she looked into her arms to compare, she would see the doll's hard glass eyes and the blank pupils housed inside them. Even covered in dust. She would have to. She couldn't have imagined me much differently, not when I _knew_. _Not when I knew what my eyes looked like—_

Mother stood, squinting. She opened her mouth to speak, and just when her sweet words were to fall from it—just when I would win—_I know you_, or _I've seen you_, or _I love you_, the communicator rang. It rang! Its five notes tore the room apart like a disaster! I was evicted screaming 'Mother!' but she didn't hear me. I know she didn't. Her eyes opened and I awoke on the floor.

I thrashed.

Green had called. Mother answered as she woke, an unconscious motion. Her eyes were wide open. Her breathing was hard.

"_What?_"

"Oh, did I interrupt?"

"_No!_" Mother caught her breath. "_Just_—_what is it?_"

"Well," I didn't see her face. "I called to tell you that I've finished the first paragraph of my speech, and uh—I dreamt of Starlight again. She wanted—"

"_Enough!" _The room shook as her fists battered the armrests of her chair. "She doesn't want anything, Green! _She's dead!_ Why do you keep telling me these things, _as if it's going to make a difference? _Are you _trying_ to hurt me—" Mother choked. She lifted her hands to wipe her eyes. "_Don't call again until you've finished your speech!_"

She hung up. Mother sat in her throne, hand over her gem, breath stumbling. I didn't rise to touch her. She never glanced my way.


	9. Chapter 9

Sometimes I can feel light and its photons bleed through me, likely coming from a solar flare, screaming through Homeworld's atmosphere. I vibrate with it, like my body yearns for that light and form. Now that the others mention me, I feel more concrete, as though I have a foot in reality. Like I could earn their attention if I try hard enough.

A scene from the past played. Mother and Green. They were posed around her bed, Green inside it and Mother leaning over her, stroking her hair, massaging her wrist where she had squeezed it. Green, curled up on her side, seemed unreceptive. If anything, she cried harder the more attention Mother gave her, weeping inside a firm embrace.

Whore.

"I never wanted to hurt you, Green."

"I know…" she gasped and sobbed.

I filled from the tips of my toes to the curve of my jaw with emptiness, dense as a black hole.

"One day you'll have countless gems relying on you. You can't cut corners. Nothing feels worse than when you're responsible for someone's death."

"I'm sorry…"

Mother held her until she stopped crying, occasionally kissing her forehead. "I forgive you," she said, and the emptiness drowned me, pushing past the border of my neck, filling my nose and throat.

"I wouldn't make you angry!" My voice scattered, echoing from all directions. I went to touch Mother's shoulder and clipped through it. "I wouldn't have cut corners! You would have never had to reprimand me! I would have done it right the first time!"

I tried to hold onto her, to grasp her in the way she held Green, but my arms obscured her image. I could interact with the past about as well as I could the present. I had never been there to make a difference in how this scene played. It was set and I tore it to tissue paper. I had obscured Mother's body and Green's face. I had ripped apart their mannequins until their stuffing, glitter, paint, and wax covered the floor. I kept going even after that.

The scene darkened with my emptiness. I poured it over everything. Screaming, I sank my nails into something solid. They punctured and ripped fresh holes with the sound of fabric tearing.

I turned to a light shining through me.

White and I locked eyes.

"Go die, _you cunt!_" I shouted, but she didn't answer. "You heard me! _It should have been you!_" I caught my breath. She kept shedding light onto the ripped curtains.

She was as unmoving as I was, both of us trapped in some strange place, staring. I began to believe that she could see me, but I couldn't move. I couldn't scream at her, nor claw her eyes out. I could only stand, still as death, evidence of my being just behind me. She must have seen right through. She must have been looking at _that_—the curtains. Not me.

Finally, I escaped. Her glow followed me, an eye hovering overhead.


	10. Chapter 10

After Mother had yelled at Green, I didn't move. I remained on the floor as she tended to her duties, made her calls, walked right through me.

Mother had said my name, but I drifted, flowing through the miniscule cracks in the control room floor, pounding into the desert like hard rain, washing into the uninhabited salon, dripping from the roof of Green's glass house and coating the plants. Her replicas attended to them, lumbering as they collected bulbs in baskets woven into their arms.

They would plant her seeds in the soil beneath me. Puncturing my back and then pouring water into the wounds. Their enormous, organic hands weren't exact, water spilling from the mouth of bronze kettles.

From my place on the ground, I saw Green, the _real_ Green, holding out her arms to her Peridots in the other room. They were trimming her moss with shears.

Some of them took what they harvested and incorporated it into the fertilizer, thrown into a machine with a vat full of fluid. Stirrers attached to a fan blended them into the bubbling mixture. The air smelled of sharp herbs and flora. I sensed it with every false photon of my theoretical body.

They laughed about something. Perhaps Green made a joke or said something clever (I doubt it). She interrupted them several times, as if they weren't supposed to be focused. As if she didn't have a speech to write. As if she wouldn't become an empress in a matter of cycles. As if that verdant bitch didn't take everything from me.

I began to leave her like I left everywhere else, absorbing into the soil like the seeds and water. _You've ruined everything_, I whispered. No one heard me. Her Peridots broke into another round of laughter. _You've ruined everything._

She turned just as I began to disappear, eyes wide, spine cold. _You've ruined everything_, I said a final time, mouth full of dirt, plants, and fertilizer. _She'll never speak of me again._


	11. Chapter 11

"I keep seeing Starlight."

They were in the music room, Green cradling a potted plant that had yet to bloom. The hag was at her instrument, fingers laced together. I sat in the corner, watching.

"I saw her in the garden yesterday. I can't explain how I know it was her, but her silhouette matched the one I've seen in my dreams. I told Mom but she doesn't believe me, and I don't know..."

White crinkled her lips. "I saw her too. She tore a hole in one of my curtains."

"_What?_"

"I'll show you."

White held out her hand and beamed an image into Green's mind, outside the salon where the ghost Pearls gathered. They looked around the corner at White, but wouldn't leave, not with her there. They were shaking.

That morning, White had pulled the curtain toward her, so the tears were no longer obscured in the folds. She checked to see if it had really happened. Green gasped at the distinct claw marks I had made.

"Are you sure this was her, White?"

"I would have remembered if I had done it." She let the image drop. "This isn't the first time I've seen her."

"Really?"

She held out her hand again, to show Green the time when I had appeared behind her workroom curtain as a smaller ghost, one of my pale feet emerging beneath it. There was the time I had stolen a document in an attempt to read its little black scratches. Then there was the time I had spent the night crying, confused because I had washed up alone. I remember that. I had been searching for Mother, but when I ran into White reading a book in the salon, I disappeared.

I didn't know she had seen me.

"Perhaps she's been trying to contact me, but now it seems she's trying to contact _you_, Green."

"So it wasn't just me."

"No," White said, placing a hand on Green's shoulder. Her pointed nails dug into her clothing. "There must be a reason."

"A reason?"

_Oh, please!_ I yelled from the corner. _As if I want to talk to either of you bitches!_

"Perhaps…" the hag trailed off.

"Perhaps?"

"Oh, Green. When Pink met her end, we tried to find a means to put her back together, but since we never located all of her shards, our research was inconclusive. But we have all of Starlight's shards, and _you're_ here." White had cupped Green's face in her enormous, clawed hands. "Perhaps one of your plants—or _you_—hold the key. Starlight must want you to bring her back!"

"What? But White, do you really think that's possible?"

"I do. There was a time when we didn't think _you_ were possible, you know." She stroked through Green's short, silver hair, but suddenly pulled away. White stared into the distance. I hope she didn't think she had found me. I was sitting to her left, glaring a hole into her gaudy cape. "Will you try?"

"To bring her back?"

"Yes," White said more quietly than I thought capable. Noisy cunt. "I'll send you the research, and the progress we've made, but you mustn't show anyone," she smiled, turning to face Green, "it's for Diamonds only."

"I won't."

"Thank you, Green." White sat at her instrument. She touched one of the keys with a finger, stroking it, but refrained from pressing down. "I watched you grow. Every time you would reach a new milestone, I was filled with pride, but..." She paused to breathe. Oh, the _drama_. "There was a pain too. I couldn't help myself from thinking about how tall she would have been, or what she would have been studying. The games you two would play together...I'm sure Starlight is furious with me."

_Really?!_ I screamed.

"But if you can bring her back, I'll apologize. I can tell her that I'm happy to have a daughter of my own, and shower her in the love she's missed."

I slammed the lowest keys. To my surprise, I created a cacophonous sound, the cry of a murder tearing through time. I shouted into her ear, _I'm not yours! You don't get to love me!_ It blew her hair back, but my voice didn't breach reality.

They were both wide-eyed with their mouths open. Green had even reached over to take White's wrist, frozen at the apex of a gasp.

I disappeared for several hours until finding Green in her room. She was reading over the research White had sent her. From a device in her hands, she scrolled through pages of dense text, with what I imagine to be scientific formulas, notes the researchers had taken, and pictures of gem shards tacked together. She paused at a picture of two arms attached at the elbow.

Perhaps those gems had lost their arms. I had never seen someone missing a limb, but if any had ever lost one, perhaps someone had found them and thought to put them together. Perhaps somewhere there's a warehouse of missing arms or legs, to save for a time when Homeworld finds a way to repair such things.

Green kept scrolling.

In another image, they had used a serum to connect the shards of a shattered Quartz. The picture they showed of her, grainy and grey, displayed the serious faults in her body when it had reformed. Her arms were asymmetrical, gashed where they had sewn her back together.

Despite having most of her shards, a sliver could have gone missing, or a fingerprint worth of dust. I wondered what had happened to her, to shatter her so severely. Had she gone to break up a conflict? Had the hag stepped on her too?

Green scrolled into a forest of text. Amongst the endless blocks appeared pictures of other Quartzes. Most of them had been put back together even more poorly than the first, missing limbs, asymmetrical faces. They looked as though they had glitched, pixels spat in every direction over a vague form. Their uniforms, from what I could tell, were issued during the same period of history. I wondered what could have shattered so many of them. Had crime risen? Were there more accidents when they went to conquer other planets?

"Why did you tell White?" I asked into her ear. The moss on her arms stood up.

She began taking notes on an ending paragraph, and I sat atop her bed. It creaked. She yawned.

"I don't want to come back like that Quartz," I told her. Green kept writing. "Mother will never love me with gashes up and down my arms."

She scrolled, wrote something, read, wrote something, yawned. From where I sat, the screen displayed a tangle of letters, white blocks against dark green. Somehow, she dissected it, yawning as she recorded small pieces of information in her book. Would anything she wrote bring me back?

It seemed impossible.

But she kept going, nodding off, fighting the lack of merciful pictures. She put her head down. I slipped into her ear.

I had forgotten how easy it was to enter her garden bed of an aura, warm, welcoming, nothing like Mother's lightning storm. She had none of the same electricity; her heat was too agreeable, too easy. She failed to overwhelm or swelter. Even Blue presented more of a threat.

I landed with a thump into the wasteland of a dream, a cactus blooming at my side.

"Hey Starlight," she said quietly. Flowers grew in her hair.

"_Why did you call her if you hadn't finished your speech?_" I rose, kicking sand into the air. "_She was so close to recognizing me!_" I fought my tears and it took the thunder from my voice. I crinkled. "Why didn't you just finish it? And why did you tell _White_, of all gems?! Now she thinks I want to speak with her! I don't want her _love!_ _I want her to crumble!_"

"But, Starlight—"

I cast a shadow over her. "You're so inept! And now you've ruined everything! _What do you have to say for yourself?_"

Green gulped. "You sound like mom."

I covered my mouth and swallowed my tears, simultaneously burning and drowning my throat.

She touched me. "I know you're mad, but maybe White was right. Maybe you came to me because I can bring you back to life."

"I don't want to be indebted to _her._" I pulled away.

"I know she dropped you, but she feels terrible about it. Didn't you hear her? She wants to apologize."

"Do you have any idea what I've missed?"

"I know, but—you can do whatever you want after you come back. You could go on vacation with Mom, or have her read you a book. You could learn to sing. You could see how kind White is—"

"_Kind_?" I boomed. "You haven't seen all the Pearls she's killed!"

"What?"

"_In her chambers!_ There are so many ghosts from the Pearls she's murdered!" I raised my hand to show her, her eyes clouding over with their faces. Lightning discharged in the distance as she witnessed each of their sweet faces and their petty crimes: Celeste, who stood up for another Pearl; Stella, who tried to sneak out of White's palace; Blush, who was caught reading on the job; Lily, who stole a teacup for her collection; Diva, who had sung too loudly; Stardust and Moonbeam, who had fallen in love. And the ruined Pearl. I don't know what she had done, but nothing could have been that severe. Nothing should have merited death by White's heel, grinding her to powder.

The following moments were shrouded in silence as Green considered them. Her mouth worked around questions she held a long time. I could see her trying to find some justification, some explanation why their punishments were so harsh.

"Well," she concluded, just when I thought she had come to understand. "Maybe they deserved it."

I drew closer, submerging her in shadows. "_Deserved it?_" The flowers in her hair died. "_Deserved it?!_" I picked her up by the neck. "_Did I deserve it?!_"

_Starlight_, she whispered.

"You don't get it, do you, _you spoiled tramp?!_" Her legs flailed through me. You can't kick a ghost. "You have no idea what it's like to lose everything! Anything you've wanted has been delivered to you on a golden platter! Name one thing you've ever lost!"

_Starlight—_

Her legs stopped. Light drained from her face. I felt her throat contract, attempting to expand with air I wouldn't allow it. I thought of stopping. I thought of dropping her into the sand to heave in an enormous breath of air. She could name something she had lost, draw back in fear and apologize for saying something so abhorrent, but it felt good to rob her. I kept wringing until the last drop of life escaped her. Her grip grew weak against my hands.

_Starlight_…

Green sat up with a start, coughing, touching her neck. As she pulled her fingers away, revealing them covered in pale sap-like blood, she spit up another seed. It clattered across her desk, scratching the surface as it collided with the wall. It was small and hard, spiked like a morning star.

With her awake, my satisfaction had gone away. I apologized into her ear and raised the hair at the back of her neck, near the scratches I had carved.

Green didn't hear me, so she went to bed, pausing to check her pulse.


	12. Chapter 12

The next morning, Mother went to my altar. She walked inside as if unwelcome, shoulders tensed as though she anticipated an attack; as if I would ever be angry with her!

I held her. I told her that I understood; I was painful to think about. I know. She's a woman of forward motion, never ruminating on the past. I kissed her cheeks. I whispered into her ear how I loved her, how hard she worked, but even then, she didn't linger. Having come with a rag, she cleaned our photos, our sitting in her control room chair together, me in a dress meant for Green, freshly awoken with my hair a mess, cuddled into her arm. She cleaned the dust on top of my bubble by popping it. Before creating another, she cradled my shards, which drank her light and reflected it back. She cleaned my gloves.

Mother held them delicately, as if my little hands still inhabited them, one finger each and in between them. She placed them home, next to my shards.

_I love you, Mother._ I prayed my voice, even without a body, would exist as the air around her. I prayed she would comprehend it, even without the strumming of vocal chords. I held her again. I prayed she could feel it. _I would never, ever blame you._

She turned to leave shortly after cleaning our things. That's alright. I was elated to have her there at all. She has such a good heart.

I took a place upon their sofa as Mother went to work. Normally, I would have followed her, but I was filled with a sweet pain. She had visited me, and we were so close, yet I couldn't touch her and she couldn't feel me.

I sat until Green stirred from her bed. She kicked off her blankets and wandered, yawning, into the main room. Then she fetched a glass of water, I assume to calm her throat, and slumped over the table. She nursed sips as the clock counted down the minutes until she would have to leave.

Blue emerged from her private room, stopping steps from her daughter.

"Green, are you alright? What happened to your neck?"

Green swallowed visibly before answering. She fingerprinted the glass. "I think I did this to myself. I had a dream that someone was choking me, and woke up bleeding." She drank.

Blue touched her shoulder. "Is it the stress? Are you worried about the ceremony?"

"It's not that." The ice chimed.

"How is your speech coming?"

She sighed. "It's not."

"Green."

"Why can't…" Her voice grew quieter. "Can someone just write it for me?"

"_Green_."

"It's not like it matters anyway. I'm never going to be a real Diamond." Finally, they looked at each other. "I just—I have nothing to say. I'd have an easier time memorizing something someone else wrote."

Blue tapped Green's gem. "You look like a real Diamond to me, and even if I said 'yes,' do you honestly think your mother would be happy with that? Do you think she would let you get away with such a thing? Would you _ever_ hear the end of it?"

Green huffed, "_No_."

"Well, I suppose you had better write your speech." Blue kissed her cheek. "It's normal that you feel anxious. It's a big day, but once you start writing, I'm sure you'll find that you have a lot to say."

"Sure. Thanks, Mom."

"Of course, dear."

Green arrived to her glass house late. Her assistants had already begun harvesting bulbs and planting seeds, while her Peridots had gathered inside the laboratory. They saluted Green as she walked in.

"Good morning, My Diamond."

"Good morning, Peridots."

I'm sure they were puzzled at her tardiness and the dark circles beneath her eyes. They gasped at the cuts along her neck, briefly theorizing before Green could notice. They came to no solid conclusions and began to produce fuel.

One of the panels in their windowed room lit up. It opened, already with a long list of orders from various sectors. Green and her Peridots, working with the clear yellow orbs, filled long, grey cylinders with the neon fluid from the machines.

The giants working in the other room poured the orbs they had collected down a long glass column leading to a conveyor belt into the machine, but before reaching the chamber, one of the Peridots sorted through them. She used a mechanical arm, whose precise fingers picked out leaves, twigs, and stones the clumsy giants included.

It didn't matter how many orders they cleared, how quickly they moved, how efficiently they filled the cylinders. They piled in the receptacle to be sorted and filled again, green diamond emblem facing forward. Green could have ten glass houses or a hundred more Peridots. They wouldn't have produced enough fuel.

They worked through the frequent pinging of the screen as the light faded from the sky. The windows filled with the soft, rosy glow of Homeworld's dusty sunset and they hadn't stopped, running between stations, treating the bulbs, making energy.

Eventually, the sunlight gave way for the stars, bright enough in their secluded patch of desert to illuminate the entire glass house. The giants had harvested all of the bulbs and had gone back to their corners, coiling into motionless shadows, lining the wall. There were yet more bulbs, so Green and her Peridots kept working.

They continued until Homeworld's moons had cleared the sky, and the night had transitioned from purple, to pitch black, to purple again, foretelling the sunrise. They worked until the last bulb had been processed, when they had no choice but to stop.

The Peridots gathered in a circle, setting their hands atop Green's, some out of breath.

"Good work everyone," she told them. "I'll see you in a few hours."

"See you soon, My Diamond," they answered, and one by one, exited.

Green dragged her feet into the garden, whose trees were barren. I knew what came next. After their break, the Peridots prepared fertilizer to make the bulbs grow back. I had seen the trees heavy, uncomfortable with fruit. Did they grow tired too, or was there a serum to keep them from wilting?

I sat next to Green. She began to nod off, and I occurred to her before she entered a dream. We sat in the garden as we were, with her aware of me but refusing to look.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," I said.

"Why should I help you if you're going to strangle me, Starlight?"

"I wouldn't help me," I answered. Heat within the glass house rose, which she correctly imagined as the crowning sunrise, orange in reality, pink in her mind.

She sighed. "I'm sure those Pearls didn't deserve to die." Finally, she granted me the blue of her eyes, the refreshing spray of an ocean breeze. I felt terrible for the claw marks along her neck. "I think being a Diamond means that, no matter what, you'll end up doing terrible things. You'll make decisions where the outcome is shattered gems or _more_ shattered gems. You'll make mistakes. Maybe the value of a Pearl's life starts to seem insignificant. Maybe everyone's life starts to seem insignificant."

A wind blew by. She imagined the plants swaying beneath it, even though it only whistled past the windows.

"Maybe if I can find a way to bring you back, you can be the daughter they want. I just…I'm not cut out for it. I like spending time with my plants, with my Peridots. I don't want more than this."

"You're doing an excellent service for Homeworld."

"Thanks." She set her chin against her knees. "You want to live again, right?"

"More than anything."

"Alright." She held out her hand. "I'll do what I can." I almost took it, but she pulled it away. "But you have to promise not to hurt me or anyone else, no matter how angry you get. Do you promise?"

"I promise."

She took my hand and held it firmly. "Even White?"

I sighed, keeping myself from clawing into her skin. "If it means seeing Mother again, then yes. Anything."

"Good."

We shook. The sky returned to its sandy color, the plants waking up and stretching toward it. Green's rendition had them opening their leaves like unfurling fingers, reaching for the sun.

"If it works, do you think…" I started, drawing her attention. "Will Mother be happy to see me?"

"_Of course._"

I blushed and started to fade. "I only wanted to see her happy."

I left her to dream, curled up in a ball like one of her giants, but breathing, sparkling. The sky brightened and the Peridots marched back inside.


	13. Chapter 13

Having closed her device, notes set in front of her, Green called White. Her communicator rang twice before the hag picked up.

"Green—" White's device floated as opposed to Green's, in the cradle of her fingertips. "Any new developments?"

"I think I have a few potential solutions to get the shards to stick together, but I need—" she cut herself off.

"A test subject?"

"Yes. Starlight has mentioned that you might have a few broken Pearls to work with. May I use one?"

"Certainly. I'll send it momentarily."

"Thank you, White."

_If you deface her corpse_, I whispered into Green's ear, but she didn't hear me. Instead, she scratched her scalp, carefully. Her flowers were budding. They looked like the start of a crown, pointing upward before blooming and falling flat.

She circled one with her finger until a brief portal opened in her room, spitting out a rainbow tinted bubble. Its surface was reflective, but I could see the gem inside, a Pearl split perfectly down the center. Celeste.

I wondered if her ghost would crash through the portal, or perhaps phase through the walls, but several minutes passed and she never arrived.

Green brought the shards and her notes to the Peridots early the next morning. All of them, staring at the bubble, greeted her with skepticism. Their "Good morning, My Diamond," bent upward with a question mark.

"Peridots," she allowed the bubble to hover above a table, "I've been trying to discover a way to put a broken gem back together, and I've come up with a few formulas. Before we tend to the plants today, will you help me mix them?"

She placed her notes on the same surface, causing an unfortunate wind before her Peridots began reading. The page was enormous enough to make them look like insects, crawling over a book dropped in the garden. They took their notes and scrambled to work, taking vials used to create fertilizer and fuel. They were labelled with elements, causing colorful plumes of smoke as the Peridots poured them into the machine. It filled vials, lining them up at the end of the table, full of a dewey liquid in shades of green.

They finished in minutes and went to work, farming the moss from Green's arms for fertilizer.

I remained in the corner where they worked, with Celeste's gem and the serums. I watched as some remained in the lab, making fertilizer, and as others went out and poured it into the soil. Her Peridots took notes on each of them, fed them a measured volume of water, and set up temporary shade over a few.

Celeste appeared at my side. She came in through the tile floor, waking with a breath as though she had emerged from a dive. Immediately she adjusted her outfit.

"My Diamond!"

"Hello, Celeste."

She looked around at the lab and at the garden adjacent to us. "Where—"

"You're in Green's glass house. Look." I pointed to her shards. She gasped, approaching them. "She's trying to find a way to repair a broken gem, to bring me back to life. White sent you as a test subject. I'm sorry."

"Oh—" She nearly touched her bubble, but didn't. "Well, if it helps you, Madame. I suppose I'm simply grateful you were here when I arrived. Waking up in this place alone, I would have…"

"Were you drifting?"

"I was."

"What about?"

"About the time I ran off with Stella, My Diamond. We found a space behind one of White's vases where we gossiped before returning to work. I was just about to find my duster when I was called here." She touched my leg.

I cupped her in my hands. We waited as Green and her Peridots worked.

We told each other stories. In our strange plane of existence, we could make images hover the way Pearls can with holograms. Our characters ran within the air until disappearing into the next scene. She told me a story of a Pearl who discovered another planet, using a telescope on behalf of her lady. I told her a story of an imaginary Diamond, who ran away from home.

I made her Red, with wild hair, smaller than the others.

"Why would she run, My Diamond?" Celeste asked me.

"She was unhappy," I settled on, as Red Diamond escaped to an equally red planet, small and perfect for her.

Finally, Green came in. Unlike the last time, the sun had yet to sink, but they had finished with the fertilizer. Small yellow orbs began to sprout in the trees.

She wiped the sweat from her brow and approached the shards and her ten or so vials of serum.

A short distance away, Celeste gasped. "My Diamond—" She couldn't help but hold onto my little finger. "If she's successful, will I come back to life?"

"That's the intention."

"I'm sorry if I leave you."

"I would be happy to see that happen, Celeste. You're allowed to be excited."

She held me tighter, hugging my fingers until her arms phased through them. I heard her breath hitch as Green arranged her pieces. She fought the urge to reform as they called out to her.

Once Mother had accidentally popped my bubble. Even in the short seconds spent on the rug, I felt them pulling me in, wishing to filter me through their broken lens and birth a broken child onto the floor. I knew how it would hurt—how arriving at that point would make my writhing mass want to mash itself back together. How the disembodied legs and disconnected tissue would make Mother hurt.

I refused to let her see me that way, and resisted the pull.

Celeste did too. She didn't state it to me, but I'm sure the thought of being seen that way, especially by a Diamond, deterred her. She stayed behind the wall of my hand, gasping.

"You can do this."

Her voice echoed from another dimension. "Thank you—"

Green poured the first elixir over her gem, held it together for a few seconds, but her halves didn't stick. She cleaned the shards, and tried again, but the edges of Celeste's body had already begun to fade. Like sand, she broke away in particles, pulled toward her gem.

"I don't want—" Her words echoed in my hand. The second serum failed.

"You don't have to form, Celeste. Stay with me."

Green poured the third serum over her, and held her gem together. That feeling of being almost whole must have been too much. The rest of her, the particles that hadn't already slipped away, escaped me, and she entered her body in two waves of light.

Green dropped her onto the table. She landed, divided down the middle, mouth wide open and limbs kicking themselves back together.

She caught one side before it rolled from the table. Panicking, she apologized and crushed Celeste with her fingers.

Green bubbled them. I shook my head. Celeste didn't return. I imagine she drifted through more pleasant memories.

Green didn't try any more serums. The feeling of Celeste's ribs must have stuck to her thumbs.


	14. Chapter 14

Green rebubbled Celeste after each trial. She washed her in serums in every shade of green, but none proved effective. She appeared frustrated, but bubbled Celeste, took her notes, and tried again.

Eventually, she thought to call her head Peridot. She dialed, notebook open beneath Celeste's gem, wet with fresh ink.

This Peridot looked exactly like the others, but her nose pointed a little higher, and she wore a floral pin near her left shoulder. "I think your serums need a thickening agent, My Diamond," she adjusted her visor, "Since you're effectively making a type of glue."

"_A thickening agent_."

They prattled on about elements, plant matter, and dirt. I grew bored of listening and left for White's chambers to check if Celeste had returned.

The palace was always creepy at night. I suspect some part of this had to do with the ghosts haunting her gaudy rooms, but by Green's suggestion, White extinguished any unnecessary lights.

It wasn't only her. Every gem who wasn't working at night followed the protocol. I remember drifting through old memories, when the capital's skyline lit up like its own sun, our lights piercing into space.

Now, clusters of stars await from the salon window, where the lights burned them away before. The ghosts were the brightest in the room, our faint lights glowing a layer above reality.

The moment I entered, the Pearls flocked to me, radiating off-white hues.

Celeste hadn't arrived, leaving only the other six.

"My Diamond!" They flocked to my foot. "You've arrived just in time!"

"We were about to pull a prank."

"Or a few."

"We were only waiting for Celeste."

"She won't be coming," I said. "Green Diamond dissipated her form. She's likely drifting."

They fell silent. I explained the experiment; that we might have a chance at coming back. They held hands.

"Would they…"

"Would anyone bring us back?"

They waited, frozen in fear that perhaps no one would. They held one another, securing wrists or shoulders. Some had grasped each other so quickly and randomly that they fazed through, becoming Pearls hooked at the hips—a tangle of arms and legs.

"I will personally see to it that you all come back." Their relief was palpable. "Until then, why don't we scare that old bitch?"

They cheered, and we entered the hallway.

Sometimes White made herself difficult to find. Despite her enormity, her chambers were even more enormous, and difficult to navigate in the darkness. Of course, we had our own dull glows. As a collective, we ghosts lit the next steps before us, but with only gentle starlight from the windows, the blackened hallways grew endless. They yawned outward, the shadowed maw of a beast large enough to swallow us all.

Upon drawing near enough, however, we found her light, radiating as she held perfectly still.

I'm not certain what she was doing. We would catch her sitting in chairs or standing in the center of a room, shining for no one, unbreathing. Her eyes would follow sometimes, I imagine by coincidence, but perhaps she could spot us. Like living gems, we might glint at certain angles.

That night, she occupied the library. We crossed her dim stare, but she didn't acknowledge us. She seemed incapable of acknowledging anything, entranced eyes reflecting nothing.

Was this sleep? White didn't omit the same aura a dreaming gem would, but maybe she wasn't capable. Maybe she was so old, everything lost its purpose and she had to shut down for some amount of time. A machine.

A few Pearls went to the curtain. Others went to a stand to spill the pages left there. I went to one of the shelves to throw books onto the floor.

They were organized from smallest on the upper shelves to the tomes on the bottom, built for her to hold. Green would sit on the floor and White would read to her, a dusty volume in her arms, yellowed pages exposed to her light.

I had laid down next to Green to compare our heights. I was a little larger, a little longer, comfortably her big sister.

But it hurt to stay, so instead I tore books from the shelves. It was never easy; it still wasn't. I had to gather all of my energy into my hand, as if compiling it there would stabilize it. My fingers felt swollen, hard, and sensitive, but I managed to grasp one of the spines.

Across the room, the Pearls were laughing. Moonbeam had managed to climb a fourth of the way up the curtains, but slid down and landed gently on the floor. The fabric wafted a bit, but White didn't turn. She sulked, unperturbed.

The other Pearls had successfully pushed one of her papers onto the floor. It wove back and forth within the air, landing with the sound of a page turning, but nothing indicated that White noticed.

She may have been drifting too.

I loosened the book and inched it toward me. Its cover whispered to White of my malintent. She still wouldn't look. I would have preferred it screamed, but I was happy with the progress, drawing it out further and further, anticipating that one, satisfying _thunk_.

I pulled hard enough and freed the book. For a short time, it fell gracelessly through the air, pages scrambling as it landed upon its cracked spine.

I was giddy to find White looking. She had finally joined us in the world of the living, a fresh bead of sweat falling along her angular face. She gasped. Only a fool like her would be afraid of a book.

I went for another. I had loosened the one next to it and grasped it easily in the space I had allotted.

I heard her breathing. My name came from her mouth in a visible gasp.

"Starlight?"

I grasped the book more firmly. It wanted to escape me, to stay on the shelf. My chorus of Pearls giggled.

"Starlight? Is that you?"

Instead of falling straight downward, I managed to toss the book. It skidded along the floor, landing steps from her feet. She gasped, her aura spiking with fear, but she didn't run. Rather, White walked past the book, closer to me. I secured another.

"Hit her in the face!" Stardust called.

"Bruise her knee caps!"

I collected myself.

"Are you trying to convey a message?" White searched for my shadow in the garish light she created. What a moron. I would never appear for her.

White's reacted as if she had realized something, as if she had located me. Our gazes didn't line up. "Green is working to bring you back, Starlight. When you're finally here, I'll read to you, if that's what you want."

_That's the last thing I want!_

I threw the book with all my energy. It collided with her ribcage, bending her in half. The Pearls cheered. I lost my glow, out of breath as White clutched the point of impact, staring at me.

I had given myself away, but she didn't draw closer, nor did she back away, eyes watering.

"I only want to love you, Starlight."

The books to the left of the gap fell over.

_I only want you to choke!_ I answered, and faded. I had used the last of my energy hating her, and washed somewhere else. Before leaving, I witnessed the Pearls follow me momentarily, only to return to knocking papers from the tables and flipping pages of the open books on the floor.

White remained in terror, surrounded by a ring of ghosts, laughing at her.


	15. Chapter 15

I awoke within the music room, limbs blinking, stuck on the floor. White sat at the floating keys, still as she was the night before, so we remained, steps apart.

I tried to move. Any moment spent in her presence was regrettable, but I was stuck. Using as much energy as I had, my limbs were inconsistent and without means of escape. My imaginary light glowed inside them before they shorted and disappeared, leaving me a dead girl without arms or legs. Even my head or torso could vanish. I was a pop of doll parts dropped onto the floor.

The area around me and its nuances grew painfully clear. I knew every photon of White's light. I knew every particle of dust. I knew the corners and saw where their molding didn't quite meet. I knew every grain of White's old bench, polished sickeningly bright. It creaked when she took a breath. Had I the energy, I would have jumped.

She started to sing and that should have hurt too. White was filled with so much air, I thought her sound would push my broken body down and send me somewhere else. Instead, I hooked to its consistency. My form rode along her perfect, frustrating waves, and I nearly picked myself up.

I'm not certain which song it was and she didn't sing again. Her body filled for a moment, pregnant with a potential phrase, but it drained from her, slowly. She considered something. Perhaps it was only a sigh.

Green arrived and brought Celeste with her. She set her gem to hover above the floating keys as she spoke with White, who asked her a question immediately: "How is it that you talk to Starlight?"

Celeste came to my side and touched me upon my shifting hand. She didn't ask me what happened. I assumed the other ghosts had filled her in.

"It's usually through dreams," Green said.

"Dreams?"

They spoke and I only caught fragments of their conversation. _I want to. Starlight. How do you? Every night? When_—Celeste leaned into me. I felt her sigh as my hand blinked from holding her to bisecting her, right along her fault.

_You shouldn't have done that, My Diamond_.

_I know._

_If I was around last night, I would have stopped you. All of you. Regardless of what she's done, it's inappropriate to act that way._

_I know._

Just then, Green and White's conversation caught up to ours. I witnessed Green's face turn angry and verdant as she crossed her arms. "She threw a book at you?!"

"I'm sure she didn't mean it." White couldn't maintain eye contact.

I almost screamed about how wrong she was; something along the lines of "How dense can you be?" but she was lying.

Why?

"I'll talk to her, White."

"No. You don't need to."

"She needs to know that she can't _do_ that!"

White held up her hand and motioned to the bubble. "Why hasn't she come back yet?"

"I don't know," Green sighed. "Before I stuck her shards together, I had to be so careful to make sure she didn't form, but I left her out for ages and nothing happened."

_I tried._ Celeste sat next to my blinking shoe. _It felt like the door closed, where it was open before. Perhaps by putting me back together, she sealed me here, My Diamond._

_That can't be_, I said, _I'm sure there's a way for you to return._

White took the bubble and popped it, causing Celeste's gem to float within the air. She rolled it, observing it from many angles, but Celeste shrugged. It didn't draw her as it had before, as if it belonged to another gem.

White stood. Celeste clutched my smallest toe through the made-up boundary of my shoe. "What is she doing?" she whispered, as White played several keys on the instrument and began to sing. The notes, unfamiliar to me, rattled the walls, and I could nearly see the soundwaves as I felt them, vibrating through my body.

I glanced downward to check on Celeste, who had begun to float. Her breathing grew panicked, but as the song continued, her spectre levitated higher and higher. She drew nearer to her gem, suspended in the air.

She was glowing. The tones passed through her and turned her form to light, a shimmering silhouette humming like a star. Her music matched White's and something kicked in my stomach.

_Form!_ I shouted. _Join them!_

_My Diamond!_

White had reached the last bar of the song, a soaring high note she held as long as possible, causing Celeste's light to enter her gem. They glowed in unison, even after the song had ended. Her light shaped itself into slender arms and legs, her puff of hair, her long, adorable nose.

But like the bubble that held her, she popped. Her gem dropped back into White's palm. Her soul skidded across the floor.

_Celeste!_ I tried to keep her from hitting the wall, but she phased through my hand. She fortunately stopped before slipping out of the room, clutching her chest.

_I—I was so close,_ she said.

Rebubbling the gem, White returned it to Green. "We'll have to try again."

Green and I stood speechless. We all stood speechless, until White sat at her instrument, playing a chord.

"Let's sing, shall we? You're still to perform."

Green hesitated, but they had their lesson. As Green's voice boomed across the walls, vibrating my imaginary photons, I sat on the floor with Celeste, in silence. The anthem's timing gave me a heartbeat.

_You were so close,_ I said.

She held my little finger.

_You were so close._


	16. Chapter 16

I went to Mother's control room and stood across from her as she worked. I had nothing to say, afraid of setting my hopes too high. I might never come back, but my body sang with possibility. I teared up, thinking there could come a day when I sit across from her in earnest, that she gives me a hard peck to my forehead.

I wanted to make her smile. She always sat there so seriously, working, working, working, but perhaps I could cause her austere face to bloom with pride. What I wouldn't give to make her blaze like a sun.

When the light dimmed from the window behind her, I kissed her cheek. As much as I loved basking in her presence, it hurt. I wanted to be hers at that moment. The longing soured my optimism, drawing the happy notes of my humming body to long, sad ones instead.

I left her, promising we would meet again, and wandered to Green.

She lay on the sofa in the palace's main room. With her leg dangling from the cushion, she stared at the ceiling, slowly blinking as she fought off sleep. Her head baubled above and below consciousness, waves of sleep putting her under with a long sigh. She submerged herself and pulled me in with her.

I landed in the library.

She slapped me.

"Why were you throwing books at White?!"

She was smaller than me, but I backed away, covering the raw side of my face.

I could have kneed her in the stomach, kicked her, slit her throat with the point of my thumb, but her eyes had watered, flared with pain. Betrayal. I knew the feeling.

"You said you would try to work with her—"

"I said no such thing."

"Well, what the _fuck_ is this, then?!"

Her profanity shocked me.

"We're trying so hard to bring you back, and you throw books at her! Choking me was bad enough, but now this?!" She placed her hand over her neck, where the scratches had healed. "Why should I bring you back, Starlight? You're going to kill someone!"

"You can't kill someone by throwing a book at them."

"You're violent!" she exploded. I backed away another step.

"_This whole mess is her fault anyway—_"

"She's trying to fix it, you idiot! White loves you!"

"I don't care if she _worships_ me! She's a murderer! I bet those horrible experiments were her idea too!"

She boiled. "That was Mom's idea!"

"_What?_"

"Look!" She went to one of the shelves and pulled out a book, paging through it as she returned and shoved it into my face. "Right here!"

I stared at the pages, a blanket of text that her mind had written from memory. It heavily resembled the reports White had sent her. Like them, it was dense and unintelligible. I could only recognize a handful of characters.

"I can't read that," I said.

"_What?_"

"_I don't know how to read._"

She sighed through her nose, her jaw tightly clenched. "Look," she showed me again, "this is the character for 'Diamond'—the one that looks like the authority crest, and this word says 'Yellow!'" She closed the book. "They all knew about it, Starlight. They all signed off on it."

"But—_why?_"

The book landed with a thud on the floor as Green sat within White's chair, covering her face with her hands.

I stayed, chewing holes in my lips.

"Do you know how Pink Diamond died?"

I didn't, but she didn't wait for my response. "She was incompetent. She was a poor leader and her gems started a rebellion, which started a war. That's why we have so many shards. That's why those creatures exist. I'd like to think that they were trying to find a way to bring Pink back, but the research doesn't say that. They might have just been angry. I'm too afraid to ask." Green leaned further back into her chair. She looked small inside it, wanting to sink onto the floor. "If you had lived to adulthood, do you honestly think you would have turned out differently?" She lowered her arms to look at me, blue eyes sharp. "White would have been around for you even more than she was for me. Do you think you wouldn't have learned to look at Pearls as objects? Or believe those shards deserved respect?"

I couldn't answer.

"I don't think you would. You'd become just like her. You might have even loved her the most."

I began to tear up again, like a fool. I hated to be so emotional, but she had hurt me. I allowed her to. "You didn't grow that way," I managed. A tear descended over the hot skin she had slapped. "You're kind to your Peridots."

"They're embarrassed of me, Starlight. I don't have a commanding presence, or ambition. I would be happy producing energy for Homeworld, but it's not enough. They want me to make impossible decisions where no one wins. They want shards on my hands."

Green stood. A pink flower fell from her hair as she walked to the door. She turned to me.

"If you hurt anyone again, I won't bring you back. Remember that."

The lights went out. I left her dream and materialized next to her, fast asleep. She had barely moved, mouth agape, sleep in her eyes.

Heels approached from the opposite direction. I turned to find Mother stomping right through me.


	17. Chapter 17

"Green," Mother had grasped her by the wrist, and she awoke, coughing. "What are you doing, sleeping on the couch?"

"I don't know." She was so slow to move. Despite Mother's hold, she lethargically took the sleep from her eyes, yawned.

Mother crossed her arms. "There's no time to get tired, Green. Have you written your speech?"

"That again?"

"Yes, _that again_. The ceremony is in four cycles, and yet you're here, sleeping it away! Have you written it or not?"

Green exhaled, her hand dragging across one eye, "_No_."

"Get your notebook. We're doing it now."

"I have to go—"

"You should have thought of that before neglecting it all this time! I'm not waiting another moment. Go!"

The room filled with a charge, a static that put even my hair on end.

Green rose, coughing into her hand, expelling several small seeds from her nose. They dripped in a thin mucus, causing Mother to cringe. Green wiped them away before heading to her room.

When she returned, nose cleaned and notebook acquired, Mother sat at the table. She sniffed as she took a place, awaiting instruction.

"_Write_."

Green sighed again. I joined them where Blue would sit. Green had labeled that page with a single word and beneath it stood a long line of cancelled letters, written and crossed out in frustrated strokes. Black and pointed, a collection of thorns.

"I'm not sure how to start," Green admitted to the tabletop.

"'My Gems.'"

Green wrote, stopped, and after a pause, kept writing.

Something seemed to come to her; she kept writing. Mother uncrossed her arms and set them before her, leaning forward. Green made progress, words building up to lines into a paragraph. Sometimes her pen would sputter, scratching out a word, leaving deep indentations upon the page that would surely show through on the other side. Mother didn't comment. She allowed Green to work.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"How do you…"

Green made a dot on the paper, pen pointed straight down. Mother waited. "How do you live with some of the things you've had to do?"

"I try to make the best decisions in the moment. Sometimes avoiding loss is impossible, so I have to be resolved in choosing the least of it."

Green wrote something—a coil spiraling inward. "Don't you get tired of it?"

"I can't get tired of it." She leaned back. Her voice softened. "It's a difficult job, but I've been chosen by fate to do it. Like you."

"Yeah." Green returned to sentences, rather than polymorphous shapes. Her pen upon the paper composed the noise between them, pausing occasionally when she stopped to think.

She filled a page, complete with sections crossed out, words scribbled over, a note escaping one of the margins.

Mother demanded what she had. Both were late to work. "This will do for now," she said. "I would stay until you finish it, but I need to leave. Now that you've had a decent start, I expect you to finish. Don't disappoint me."

"I'll try," Green said.

"There is no try."

Mother left, and rather than Green following her to the warp, she sat with her notebook, looking over the first page of her writing. I could have sworn her eyes sank in.

Green went to work tired. She toiled in the glass house until dragging her weary body to her music lesson. She entered hunched over. Even the plant in her arms seemed to wilt, a leaf falling into its soil when she set it on the corner of White's instrument. She had brought Celeste with her, who also hovered above the floating keys, patiently waiting her turn.

White pressed one of the keys. "Oh, Green. You looked so tired, dear. What happened?"

"Mom got on me this morning for not finishing my speech."

"The Yellow one?"

Green made a single, hard chuckle. "It's _always_ the Yellow one."

"She's strict because she loves you, Green."

"I know."

White played a chord with her mind. I wondered if I could do the same if I were alive. "I think I've discovered the problem last time, at least in theory. We were so close that perhaps she only needs another song. I brought this—" She released it from her hand—a small bronze bell. "Since they seem capable of interacting with objects, I thought Starlight could ring this bell if we come close."

From my distance, I tried to touch it with my mind. Nothing happened. I would have to approach.

"Did you hear that, Starlight?"

I batted the bell from her grasp. It jingled across the floor until stopping against a bench leg. Both gasped, but White picked it up and put it back.

"Well, now that we're all in attendance, let's begin. Green, I hope you'll sing too."

She played another chord, a lower one. Both of them sang in sync, moving upward. Side-by-side for a comparison, their voices sounded different despite hitting the same pitch. Green's was warm, but White's sounded shriller, thinner, enabling her to hit higher notes. They had moved to the right extreme of the instrument, where Green struggled. She did manage to hit the note White had pressed, requiring her to hoist everything she had forward, where White was louder and unperturbed. She might have been able to sing notes the instrument couldn't make.

Celeste touched my ankle. "Do you think it will work, My Diamond?"

"I hope so."

They had reached the end of their warm up and White played the song's overture. I had recognized it from somewhere; perhaps Green had learned it ages ago, or White had performed it. They had gone through so many songs. I couldn't differentiate between ones White has preformed and passed to Green, or ones that were Green's alone or White's alone. They existed in pages of sheet music, with words I couldn't read, with notes I couldn't read, pitches and syllables that, when added together, made something beautiful.

"I want to be your Pearl when you come back, My Diamond."

"I'd like that, Celeste."

They both started singing, their voices quaking the density of our reality. The air around us changed, more potent, with Green's voice filling the room.

Celeste's light began to disappear. Riding the sound waves inward, she entered her gem, a glow emanating from it. I rang the bell. Both White and Green seemed surprised, but didn't stop, delving deeper into the song.

They sang of an old fortress brought back to its former glory, reaching upward, as though they were building from the ground. Their song became like a tower, overwhelming me in its shadow, and for a moment, the light around Celeste's gem disappeared. Only the crack along its center glowed, developing a pulse. They afflicted her with another long, high pitched wave, and we had reached a summit as her body spilled on beat.

White and Green grasped each other as she took shape, continuing to sing the final notes, though White had stopped playing. As their song waned, Celeste's white-hot light cooled. She popped into existence and landed on the stage of White's palm.

My bell jingled onto the floor.

Green's shoulder had begun to bleed under the pressure of White's nails, but she hardly noticed. She whispered, "We did it." Then, more loudly, "We did it!"

She hugged White, who, with her free arm returned the embrace. She didn't speak, having buried her face in Green's shoulder.


	18. Chapter 18

Ghosts on Homeworld weren't hard to find. On days when no one thought of me, I would roam the streets and find them, clustered around places they used to work. We wouldn't normally talk. I would pass, perhaps on my may to Mother, and they would mouth my name into their hands.

I couldn't cast a shadow over them, but they acted like I did. That morning they did too. I arrived, leaning over their glass-roofed factories, or into dormitories they haunted, or in the middle of the desert where we both didn't belong, saying, "Excuse me, I know this is a personal question, but would you tell me how you died?"

"It's an honor to meet you, My Diamond," a Topaz guard said to me. She crossed her arms over her chest and bowed. "I lost my life defending Yellow Diamond's sanctum from intruders."

I thanked her and asked a group of Peridots. They stood outside a factory, whose sliding doors snapped open and shut with workers traveling in and out. The carried broken machine limbs, the doors opening with a clattering of light. I asked the three of them how they died.

One had a cog dropped on her.

One had been electrocuted.

One had become trapped in the gears of a machine.

I thanked them and approached a Quartz soldier I found, lingering near a living noble woman. She was out with a friend, taking a walk, stopping occasionally to look into the distance, unknowingly toward the Quartz. The ghost tried to touch her hand. It phased through.

I asked her how she died.

"I was caught fusing with my lady," she said. "We fell in love, but when the authorities found out, I took most of the blame." She touched her lady's shoulder. "I preferred it happen that way. My job was to keep her alive and well, even though I couldn't protect her from myself."

"Who was it who shattered you?" I asked.

"Yellow Diamond ordered it, but it was carried out in prison, My Diamond."

I thanked her and asked a one-legged Pearl inside a mansion. She stood near a picture frame of her lady as a fleet of maids swept the floor.

"Actually, this isn't my lady," she said. "I was meant for her, but I emerged with one leg. Once they saw me, they shattered me."

"Because of your deformity?"

"That's right, Madame, but that was a long time ago. Things are different now, with the resource shortage and invention of limb enhancers."

I thanked her and asked many other gems. I met gems who had died from emerging misshapen; gems whose Diamond ordered them to die—White, Blue, Yellow. Somehow never Pink. I met gems who were broken in accidents. I met gems who fell in love. I met gems who never had much chance to live and gems who experienced so much life. All of them saluted me. They called me "My Diamond" as they told me their stories, and I listened, building a list.

I traveled past the desert, into a city not far from the capitol, rising from the sand. The buildings grew shorter. They were uniform, even more utilitarian—built around the same time, and too short to block out the sun.

There I met a ghost Ruby, hiding in a building's shadow near an empty street. I asked her. She told me.

"Yellow Diamond killed me."

I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn't. "Why?" I asked.

"I talked back to her during my trial. They accused me of stealing a ship, and it really looked like I had done it. When I insisted on telling her otherwise, well..."

I wasn't sure what to say.

"Don't worry about it," she told me. "I should have known better. Yellow was obviously in a bad mood, and she didn't intend to shatter me. I would have just been punished, but I had to run my mouth."

I touched her, and her skin turned red where my fingers settled. Perhaps her light could filter through my broken prism. I pinched her hand.

"She shouldn't have done that."

"Thank you," she said. Her specter disappeared, having found some peace.

I went back to the palace after that. The sun was setting and Green would return home, but when I arrived, traveling through the big empty hall to the second floor, I found Mother. She lay upon her bed, the doors open, staring at nothing. I worried and lingered in the doorway.

_I tried looking for the soldiers_, I told her, _but their ghosts must be somewhere else._

Mother blinked her drooping eyes. She pressed her weary lips. She sighed. I stayed watching her, unable to push past her electric aura, unable to touch her, though I didn't try. We sat together as I felt the danger beating through her—the stable current that powered so much of our empire. I felt her weight. I felt her pressure. The beaming glow she used to wear no longer blinded me. I still loved her.

Blue appeared within the door. "Hey," she said. "I guess you had the same idea of a little nap." She took a spot next to Mother. The bed squealed as they settled their arms around each other, face-to-face.

Mother wouldn't talk. She held Blue by the waist.

"What's wrong?" Blue traced Mother's jawline.

"I don't know what it is, but I keep thinking of Starlight."

My ghost perked at my name. I took a tiny step toward existing. _Starlight_ painted me in pale colors where my ghost held none before.

"It's normal you would think about her," Blue said. "I'm sure she would forgive you if she could."

"But she can't," Mother said.

_But I do,_ I whispered. _I do._

I didn't remain. Blue was there to comfort Mother in ways I couldn't, and it hurt to watch from the wall. Green had come home anyway, singing from the other room. I wanted to speak to her. I wanted to apologize, if she would let me.


	19. Chapter 19

White gave Celeste to Green. "For Starlight," she said, and Green brought her to the glass house, where she worked in the garden. The Peridots in the laboratory would sometimes watch her watering plants in her outdated uniform, observing her scar.

"I can't believe she did it," one said to another. Celeste came to their side of the window to fill her watering can.

"Of course she did," the other answered. "She's a Diamond."

Green tended to her plants that day, singing to them to help them grow. Her giants poured the fertilizer and Green projected her voice even into the laboratory, which must have entered through the cracks between the windows. More pink flowers had grown in her hair. Celeste looked to her and smiled, a single white bud growing from her own head. It opened when Green came near.

Her lead Peridot said it was a result of the potion used to adhere her shards. Part of the mixture, embarrassingly, involved the tiny seeds that came from her nose.

Even so, I wondered if I would grow flowers too. I hoped I would.

I sat on Green's bed, thinking of blooming as she worked on her speech. She had managed a few sentences before dozing off, having spent a long day in her glass house.

Chin resting on her hand, she drifted, and I went to speak to her, entering through a flower sprouting behind her ear.

I arrived at the bottom of her pool. The sunlight filtered in from overhead.

"Hey, Green," I said.

"Hey, Starlight."

I embraced her. Without phasing through, I set my chin on her crown, where her flowers tickled my chin. She held me back, squeezing me around the ribcage.

"I'm sorry for being cruel," I told her.

"I'm sorry I hit you, and yelled at you."

"It was only a dream."

We let each other go. My head hurt as flowers sprouted from my scalp, opening to absorb the sunlight. Green touched one of them, pulling out a long white petal.

"We really did it, didn't we?" she said. "I kind of can't believe it."

"Why not? You did most of the work."

"I know, but," she sighed, "I'm so used to sucking at everything."

"Don't say that." Notes drifted in, like a soundwave through the water, music in the pool. Blooms opened on the floor, drifting delicately to the waves. "I've been thinking about what you said, and about what Mother said." I leaned back. "If you're really to be your own Diamond, then it's your life, Green. You don't have to do everything they say."

She flashed me a wry smile, blinking in the light. "I'm surprised to hear that coming from you, Stars."

"'_Stars?'_" My nose crinkled. "Anyhow, it's true. Mother may have given you life, but it's your life, and you should strive to be the greatest Diamond you can be. I still love Mother, but…" I trailed off. "There are clearly some things that need to be fixed."

She stole another petal. "Yeah." The field grew brighter, white flowers opening. "What do you want to do when you come back? I'm sure Mom will be so happy to see you that she'll take you anywhere."

The current grew warmer. "If she doesn't mind, perhaps we could go to the beach together, sit in the sand and listen to a story."

"Listen to a story?"

"You used to have this machine—" I approximated it in my hands. "You would press a button and it would narrate."

"Oh, that thing." She leaned back. "No one uses those anymore, but I think I have mine, somewhere. You can have it if it still works."

"Well, excuse me for not being up-to-date. But thank you. I'll take it if you no longer need it." I plucked a flower from her hair. She didn't mind. The pool around us had all but disappeared, aside from the little patch of flowers, defined by their shadows.

"What else?" she asked.

I sighed, plucked a petal. "I want to sing. You always make it look so easy, and it sounds beautiful. I wonder if my voice has any powers."

"Why don't we try it?"

"Now?"

"Why not?" She stood. "Just try to copy me. _Mi-mi-mi-mi—_"

It sounded perfect when she did it.

"I can't."

"Just try it!"

I mumbled, "Mi-mi-mi-mi…"

"Come on, Stars! You can do it!"

I tried again. My face felt as though it had caught fire. I slipped a finger under my collar. Our flowers burned away.

"Open your mouth!"

I opened my mouth, a too-high version of the notes echoing around us. It sounded perfect, but I hadn't done it. Green may have imagined the sound coming from my body, but I felt neither the strum of my vocal chords, nor the tornado from my lungs. They were so loud, our pool began to quake, and the canvas beyond the flowers produced two enormous silver eyes.

Green and I shouted, but it didn't overtake the sound around us. It rolled toward me, a distortion in the pool from someone else jumping in. The rip tide washed me away.

I saw Green screaming after me, holding out a hand that I was too late to catch as I was sung out of her mind. She woke up with a pop as I was dragged away at light speed, into the Capitol streets, through its towering buildings, its monuments, past its courthouse and theaters and factories, past the ships flying overhead, past its gems out for errands. I ended up in another corner of it, where the buildings became consistently white and I crashed onto _her_ palace floor—that cursed place I was doomed for.

I had almost entered her mind. I stopped before she could pull me in, crashing against her lavish carpet. Regaining my footing, I found her merely standing there. She had placed her arms out as if she were a beacon, signaling from the gem flashing in her forehead.

I stood watching as her light ebbed around her, forming tendrils and reaching. They grew into arms, which grew hands, which searched around the room for something, or more accurately, _someone_. Its fingers seared me as they came close, searching for my arm or my leg—something to grasp, but I wouldn't allow them to touch me. Every time she drew close, I backed away, tucked myself into a corner, spilled into the wall, avoiding her.

A few Pearls stood at the door. They held one another by the arms, whispering, as we made eye contact. I thought to ask them for help, but there was nothing anyone could do to stop White seeking, so I avoided her as they felt sorry for me.

Eventually, she stopped. Her light gave up on holding me. Her eyes had closed, her long, ridiculous lashes casting shadows onto her cheeks. I kept waiting for them to open, to connect me with her stare, but no matter how many times I counted down, they never did.

Her light pooled around her head. It drained from her limbs to be projected from her gem, forming a thought bubble. A scene played inside it, although I wasn't certain if it was projected for the entire room, or if only we ghosts could see. Either way, I stuck to the sidelines as always, as White imagined a kitchen with two cups of hot water on the counter.

"Starlight!" she called, "Your tea is ready!"

Someone arrived within the doorway. She was tall like me, and blond like me, and her squared pupils were white like mine, but something was off. Her gold was too dull. Her gem was the wrong shape. She looked too happy to see White. In a voice notes higher than mine, she greeted her, calling her Mother.

White must have believed that she had captured me; that she dragged me into her dream to play her daughter.

I watched the other Starlight take her teacup. Holding it, she listened while White talked, nodding as her terrible nails fondled the golden trim of her epaulettes. "Your coronation is soon. Are you ready, Starlight? Have you practiced your speech? Oh, of course you have. I'm so proud of you. Are you excited? Surely, you must be. You'll be able to conquer planets by yourself, but how Yellow will miss having you at her side."

She went on, praising her, complimenting her military uniform as she traced over the metals, telling her what a pretty girl she was and how everyone loved her. Then Starlight left. She had to work under Yellow, and make preparations for the ceremony. White stood waving by the door as she went, handing her a small gift box whose insides I never saw. It could have been ornamentation she could wear—a tiara? Perhaps a crown for the queen she intended me to be.

I didn't wait for White to wake up. It seemed that since that scene had ended, she began another, the actual coronation when 'Starlight' stood on stage and sang the anthem herself. Her voice echoed around the room, different from Green's, but high-pitched, similar. She hadn't heard me speak. Of course she wouldn't know how low my voice was.

I left, unable to watch anymore of her dream.


	20. Chapter 20

The ceremony approached. Green and her Peridots tended to the plants growing within the arena. They trimmed the long vines covering the back of the stage, feeding them, ensuring that they didn't bloom just yet. The vines were covered with tiny buds that would become flowers, still green, but soon to turn an eager blue before opening. Green continued her speech. She practiced her song with White.

Another Pearl awaited Green at the instrument—Stella, who White had broken into far more pieces than Celeste. She sat, her hands in her lap, acknowledging Green sheepishly when she entered.

I hadn't come to her chambers since she dragged me into her dream.

"Green," she said, "before we bring Starlight back, I would prefer we practice."

"I wanted to talk to you about that." Green took the bubble, allowing it to hover above her finger. "I want to make sure it wasn't just a fluke."

"Yes, and Starlight might be more difficult."

"We'll figure it out," Green said, touching her shoulder.

"I only hope she doesn't mind waiting a bit longer."

_I've waited this long_, I said, but neither heard me. They began practice.

White provided Green with the broken gems of two more Pearls—Stardust and Moonbeam, who she kept floating beneath her desk. It took time for her to put them together. She was busy, after all. I hardly caught her sleeping, working late into the night at her glass house, or preparing for the ceremony.

Celeste would help her. Green might ask her to fetch a chemical, or to man the fuel compressor, which she taught her to use. Green would fill the cylinders, and they cleaned up afterward as the sun rose.

"Thank you for helping me, Pearl," Green told her. The deep chasms beneath Blue's eyes cameoed on her face. The next shift would begin soon.

"Thank you for bringing me back, My Diamond." She bowed. "I'm grateful to be alive again."

Green pressed a button, to shower the plants in the other chamber. "You're a good Pearl. Can I ask…" She pressed another button. The fuel compressor filled with hot water, to clean its insides.

"Oh." Celeste blushed. "I stood up for another Pearl, Madame. I witnessed White Diamond scolding her for something I knew she hadn't done, so I raised my voice."

"That's it?"

"Yes, Madame, but it was several centuries ago, when she was much stricter. I should have known better."

Green allowed her fingers to slip along the window, next to her row of buttons. They left a ghost of her prints, long and lamenting as a smear. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't shatter anyone for that."

"Thank you, My Diamond. I'm fortunate to serve you."

"For the time being," Green turned off the overhead lights. "Hopefully you'll be Starlight's soon."

After rehearsing, after work, Green and Celeste put the other Pearls together. With her small hands, Celeste held them as Green poured her serum, placing the next piece as soon as the others adhered.

"I remember what order they're in," she said. "I saw their gems almost every day." Celeste set them so that little space lay between the shards. The serum would dry flat and clear, resulting in a Pearl that didn't seem to have egregious faults, unless observed closely. Even severely shattered Stardust had few imperfections once Celeste rebubbled her.

I touched her on the shoulder and whispered into her ear, "You're doing a great job." She couldn't hear me.

Green thanked her, and took the Pearls to White during their next music lesson.

The same song didn't work every time. They first tried with Moonbeam the one they did with Celeste, but her soul wouldn't move in time to the music, firmly planted in the soil of the afterlife. They had to keep guessing, while Moonbeam respectfully shook her head. I held the bell in my hand, perpetually, but didn't ring it for the longest time.

Finally, they chose something from her time period (by accident; it's not as though White would genuinely remember). Even at the end of the first bar, her ghost gained that ephemeral glow. She shouted, "I would hear this song when I would clean the salon!" She reached out to me as she hollered, her colors reflecting a peach and purple twilight. They carried the scent of a pleasant memory, creating a path through which she returned to her gem. Petal by petal, she left me and popped back into existence on the stage of White's hand.

White cried again. She cried whenever they brought back another Pearl. Stardust, Stella. Tears smeared the black around her lashes, though her face hardly changed. Perhaps it was a reminder that this impossible task was secretly possible. She observed their scars, drawn finely across their bodies, watching as air filled their lungs.

They sat politely in her palm and shook. I don't blame them for being afraid. White, enormous and crying, held them before the observatory of her eyes, watching, studying. They saluted her. Even the best pranksters of my court saluted her.

Then she would release them for Green to bring back to the glass house. They embraced Celeste and each other. I longed for the day that I would embrace them too. I wanted to feel them in my _real_ hands, set them upon firm shoulders, and allow them to touch my fingers without phasing through.

But I could wait. I heard them speak of me during their free time, after they had assisted Green and her Peridots. With different-colored flowers growing from their heads, they blended in with the garden as they sat.

I looked forward to being the largest flower of them all.

Green and White brought back Lily, Diva, and Blush, shattered the longest time ago, pulling the most severely broken of my Pearls from the salon and into the glass house. I helped them go, watched as the others remembered the puzzle of their shards, and sang them back to life on the wind of White and Green's voices. They took longer. Their cracks were like the unending roots of a tree, main veins splintering into smaller ones. Thank the stars their pieces were all there. Their songs took quite a few tries too, but one by one, they arrived safely into existence, leaving only the Ruined Pearl in the salon.

They had tried to put her back together again. All seven of the other Pearls gathered around and set her pieces, but there was too much space between them. White had shattered her so that parts of her had turned to powder, grains too small to collect. Perhaps they had become part of Homeworld, stopping in the desert and collected for the glass of Green's house. She might have become part of another gem, or recycled into the core of the planet, joining Homeworld Herself.

I touched between her shoulder blades. "I'm sorry to leave you like this," I told her. "We can't bring you back yet, but I promise, I won't stop seeking a solution. I hope that you'll forgive me."

As I spoke, I drew out her tears. Like they always had, they bled upwards, heat rising from the deep, disappearing through the ceiling. Without the other ghosts, there were far fewer lights, but even in the dark, I saw her tears bubble more intensely. I sat in silence as they escaped her and she began to drift.

I told her I loved her as she left me. I hope she wasn't angry. I wished she had a name.


	21. Chapter 21

I came to Green in a dream in her garden. We sat beneath a tree that was larger than her glass house, larger than the tallest buildings. Its shade covered us and her assistants, watering plants that looked like Pearls, all vines and flowers.

"Are you ready?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "albeit I admit I'm nervous."

"I am too."

The shapes in the leaves set in the shade played like changing clouds. Their shadows combined together and they made creatures, one long-snouted monster pursuing another, influenced by the wind. It made the plants speak, crisp chimes that didn't create comprehensible words, but within the logic of our dream, I understood. They chattered happily. They sang.

I felt a flower blossom from my skin. Painlessly, it pushed between my knuckles.

"I'll have to put your gem back together," Green said.

"You have my permission."

"It's not your permission I'm worried about." She bit her thumb nail. "If Mom goes to visit your shards...I mean, it's one thing for me to glue your pieces together and bring you back, but without your resurrection, I would just be desecrating your corpse..."

"She barely visits," I said. "Besides, she's ordered shards put back together too. Incorrectly, I might add."

"I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to apologize for." More flowers sprouted from me as we relaxed against the tree. "I still want to spend time with her." I sighed. A flower grew from the roots of my heart, above my breast, "and you, and my Pearls. It's been lonely without them, but I'm proud to watch them assist you."

"They're really sweet."

The wind picked up. As it did, a cloud came and obscured the sunlight, casting the tree in shadow. The leaves of the plants rustled, some taking off and blowing away.

"Do you believe I can do this, Starlight?"

The shadow grew darker.

I touched her hand. Mine was larger. "You're not an ordinary Diamond, but you've made life before, and you've brought back all of my Pearls. I'm confident you can do this too."

"Thank you, Starlight. What song should we sing to you?"

"I don't know," I answered. "Perhaps something…dutiful? I suppose I just have one request."

"What is that?"

I filled my body with the sweet garden air, full of the perfume of flowers. "I don't want White to sing to me."

Green took a moment. It seemed that she sighed a little. "Okay, Stars," she said. "I'll let her know."

"Thank you."

I hardened to tree bark. Green kept breathing away, the rising and falling of her chest matching that of her real body. With each exhale, she expelled me a little further away until waking that morning and stealing my shards.


	22. Chapter 22

My Pearls put me back together. Working quickly as my shards glared in the dawning sunlight, they sealed the spaces between my pieces, which Green held delicately, like a still-beating heart.

My specter felt condensed. Instead of the free glowing limbs and light escaping from every angle, I was corseted, back straightened, confined to the inside of my body. I had to focus especially on breathing, which I did on the way to White's chambers. Each step required so much of me, yet I was tugged along, bound to the gem that would hopefully sprout from my forehead.

Green had called ahead. It wasn't the normal hour for their practice, but none of us wanted to wait a moment longer.

White's hands shook upon her lap. I watched her breath hitch as Green approached, having rebubbled my gem in her color.

They stared at each other for several seconds.

"Are you ready?" Green asked.

Gulping, White replied, "Yes. Did she request any songs in particular?"

"Well," Green picked at her nails. "She didn't request anything in particular, but she asked that…" She met White's eyes, biting her lip, pulling the truth from her throat. "She asked that you don't sing."

I'm not sure what I expected from White, but I was surprised that she held still. She blinked exactly once, curled her lips. It seemed that she, too, searched for the right words, perhaps posing to ask why, but not truly wanting to know the answer. But I'm sure she knew. We all did.

Simply, she nodded. "Alright then. Let's warm up, shall we?"

White played her scales well, the right notes at the right time, but she pressed the keys harder than before. Sometimes they stuck, blending sounds that weren't supposed to blend. Outside of Green singing, White was silent. I felt odd, like an unwelcome knife placed between them. The approximate boundaries of my ghost became rough, goose-pimpled in the cold air Green's admission had made.

Still, Green sang. They created a pile of thick music books in the middle of the floor, embellished by eons of dust. White suggested pages and Green would turn to them, locating several songs I had never heard before. Many were songs about nobility, stuffy and with rigid structures. When those didn't work, they tried a few military songs, written specifically for Mother. I understood the words in those better, though some were still unclear and archaic, detailing serving Homeworld under Yellow Diamond. Singing them, Green had to try not to laugh. Her words were consistently bent within a smile. I think even if she had sung them seriously, they wouldn't have moved me. Despite detailing Mother in such a flattering way, they never called my soul home. In a last-ditch effort, they tried a few silly songs, whose pages were filled with cutely drawn gems in elaborate costumes. I wondered if these were from some sort of play. They followed a kind of story, from the perspective of one character singing to another, telling a tale. Entertaining as they were, I never felt the overwhelming urge to form. I was stagnant as my gem, glittering lazily in White's glow.

I sighed. We had gone through more music than I had known existed. White set her face into her hands.

"It's not working. If we don't bring Starlight back, she'll never forgive me—"

"White, _please_. Now is not the time."

We sat in silence as Green picked at her lips. I glanced beside me, expecting to find the little ghost of one of my Pearls, but there was no one. Of course there wasn't. I picked my lip too.

"Let's just try the anthem. I've gotten good at making the flowers bloom at the end. Maybe it will work."

White played again. Sitting at her instrument, she seemed to slip into a meditative trance, unblinking as she manipulated the keys. She had played this song so often for Green to practice that its notes were perfect. Above them, Green interjected her voice.

It left her in waves. I felt them, warm as they enveloped me, grasping me by the hips and pulling me in with their riptide. Her gravity wrapped itself around my wrists, my knees, my ankles, but I felt that I had a pull as well. It didn't act against her, but I grasped a hold of the string she used to reel me in, made of her energy, which I siphoned as she sealed me to my gem.

I couldn't ring the bell any longer, which had dropped to the floor, yet I had a view of my surroundings. I could still hear Green's voice as it wove me a body. I saw my gem shimmer in its spectrum, its light yellow fetching a rainbow when illuminated.

I was a Diamond.

I felt my body, solid, with real boundaries form around it. My legs sprouted and landed on the floor, tall and sturdy like the foundation of a skyscraper. My torso shaped around womanly curves.

"Don't stop!" White shouted. She hadn't moved her gaze from me.

With my new forming eyes, I saw Green. Her voice, still pulling me from death, weakened. Even her color, usually so verdant, had dulled to that of a pale, sickly leaf.

I felt terrible and she let me go. With the snapping of a chord, I skidded and she fell to her knees. We were both breathing hard.

White stood up from her instrument and looked down at Green. "I don't think you need me," she said.

Green didn't reply, lying fully upon the floor.


	23. Chapter 23

In preparation, Green practiced singing the anthem, its final note elongated, while White recorded the accompaniment. She reviewed, running between work and rehearsal, filling her body with as much air as she could. I watched her finish her speech, jotting down a few words to the tune of White's recording, ever echoing in the background.

Mother came home that evening, eyes darker than usual. I hadn't visited in a while, but between the ceremony and her regular workload, she likely hadn't stopped in days.

Green embraced her, and gave her the first draft of the speech.

"You cut it to the wire," Mother said, "but I'm glad you finished."

"Thanks, Mom." Green squeezed her again, hard, perhaps in the hopes of ridding her of exhaustion. For a moment I believed she could. "I'm going to practice singing now. I hope you'll be impressed with how good it is." She winked, wearing a wry smile Mother didn't catch.

"I'm sure I will."

They parted ways. Mother drifted back to her room, walking as though she hurt. I suspected her back, held against her throne room chair for days at a time. Green went to her room to practice. She read her speech aloud a few times, then moved onto the anthem. My gem waited inside her glass house, but my soul swelled with the blossoming high notes.

She dreamt of me that night and I told her that she could do it. I appeared as though I were truly there, with an entire body, embellished in full color. She had painted me in gentle gold, which looked so lovely beneath the dream garden sun.

"I can't wait to show you to Mom," she said. "She's going to be so happy."

"I will be too."

That morning she went to her glass house before the sun had risen. It threatened its ascension, turning the sky mild purple. Stars still poked from its forehead, kept safe in the deep majestic color before being torched away. My pearls awaited her. They looked so sweet, having dressed for the occasion, formal gowns—Diva's with multiple layers—and the flowers growing from their heads.

I wanted flowers too.

Green greeted them. She set up White's recording of the accompaniment. I didn't imagine it was actually necessary, but it helped keep her on pitch. I'm sure it would be distracting to only hear her own voice.

She popped my bubble. My gem, no longer housed in her greenish tint, sparkled brilliantly even in the transitioning light. Its faults and veins where she had glued me back together were small enough to almost be negligible. It didn't stop my gem from shining. In looking at it, my breath hitched.

"Madame?" Celeste asked, "If you don't mind, we would like to sing with you."

"In fact, we insist," said Diva.

"We've been practicing," said Blush.

"And we want to help bring Our Diamond back," said Lily.

They waited for Green's answer, prearranged into a choir.

"Of course you can," Green said. "I think she would appreciate it."

They wanted to cheer, but they were trained to be polite. Only Stardust hollered. The rest stood so quietly.

_No_, I said. _Be loud._

The recording began its overture, and when Green sang, she overtook it, her voice bounding between her shivering glass walls. My gem lifted from the table where she had set it. My specter began to disappear, pulled in by the feet and woven into my new body of white light. My Pearls joined in. They threaded me through the needle of my gem, pulled by their chords and Green, who held most of me. I drank life from the well of their voices.

My jagged energy took a womanly shape. I formed arms to hug mother and legs to strut around the capitol. I grew eyes with a frothing of long lashes, plump lips that felt shapely and dense upon my face. I felt the long stem of my neck as it sprouted, elegant and made for necklaces. I felt the sunshine yellow of my hair.

My Pearls gasped. They ran out of air. The song drew seconds closer to its conclusion, the time ticking away by the little electric numbers on Green's device. Green sustained the note much longer than normal. It thinned, my body was finishing, but a piece of my ghost still remained outside. It made a swirling mess of eyes and a nose and lips and hatred, my stomach aching as Green's sound ran out.

I fell. My body crashed like a ray of sunshine onto the plants, onto my flowering pearls, onto the soil. Green too, had collapsed, albeit more gracefully. She gasped as if she had run a long distance, her color blanched, her green greyed.

My gem clinked against the floor. Luckily my falling body delivered it there smoothly before I shattered again.

"We were so close," Green said. "_We were so close!_"

The Peridots arrived. She would have to try again later.

Green came earlier the next day. The sky was solid in its deep color, the stars untouched by any other fire. Green woke up my sleeping Pearls. The rest joined her because they knew it was time. They all tried again, burst my bubble and sang me to life, except that wasn't enough. "That was just a warm up," Green said, and they tried again and again and again until the Peridots signaled that it was time to work.

Green went the next day, and the day after that.

My ghost hurt. I would drift between one place to another, my hypothetical arms and legs swelling with potential. _We were real_, they bitched before disappearing and flashing back, inconsistently swirling.

_Soon_, I told my rolling blackout body. _Soon we'll be a lightning storm for real._

White called Green after the fifth day. "How is it going?" she asked inside the screen holding her face. Her glow warped Green's room, making it pointed and nervous. She bleached the color from it, like I had bled Green's pigments.

Even inside White's corrective light, she looked exhausted.

"It's...going," Green said. She kept her voice low. No one seemed to be around, but none of us wanted to ruin the surprise.

White waited for clarification.

"I've come close a few times. It's like I can feel her and she's _right_ there, but it hasn't been enough yet. It's like I need more _voice_. I've been practicing some breathing exercises, but—" she sighed. "It's hard."

White didn't answer for a long time, long enough for Green to ask, "You're not angry at me, are you?"

She gave a solitary, "No." She looked forward neutrally in thought. "Come to me for another round of practice. Bring Starlight's gem."

White hung up. She left the room sounding hollow.

Green stowed my gem secretly in a compartment within her dress. There was no danger of my forming, so no need for a bubble. She removed it from her skirts before entering the music room. White awaited her. She had set out the sheet music and placed herself before the floating keys.

Green approached, holding my gem like a sacrificial bundle of flowers. She bit her lip, and stopped steps before the instrument, when White turned around.

"Show me what you do," she said. "I'll play."

She began the overture; no scales, no chords, no warm-ups. White played as though the notes in their exact order would bring me back. She played it perfectly.

Green sung where she should. They had done this hundreds of times, but I was less practiced. My gem shook, ready to pull me through. My light formed around it, building from the head down, the rebirth I had suffered so many times yet couldn't have. Maybe Green became caught on the legs, the small details of my features, though asking her to author them hardly seemed fair.

Over the course of those few minutes, she pulled me through. Then came the last second of the song, where I nearly existed, almost took my first breath, but didn't. She couldn't produce any more voice despite holding that last note forever. I was almost free, but as always, I had left some part of myself behind. It was stuck to the floor, refusing to unhook itself.

My nonbirth had dropped Green. She always looked kicked in the ribs, heaving and colorless. Before her teacher, Green had given the most I had ever seen. As such, she wilted.

White turned to her and sighed. "You sang it just like I've taught you. If this were your coronation, you would have certainly stolen everyone's hearts."

_But_.

We all must have anticipated it, but White didn't need to say it. Green's efforts objectively weren't enough.

White smoothed over a few keys without pressing down. "I wish Starlight would let me help you. I wish…" She looked to Green again, who was still catching her breath upon the floor. "I wish I could convince her not to hate me."

"She's probably listening," Green coughed.

"I know she is." White didn't search for me that time. Perhaps she realized that it was ridiculous. Instead she sighed, looking gently at Green, who still hadn't taken her pigment back. She had tried that morning as well, but I had taken too much from her. It would be a while.

"I can only gain her forgiveness if she lives. No words can replace what she's lost." White turned away. "Promise me you'll keep trying, Green. You were so close."

"Yeah," Green stumbled to her feet. "Of course I will."

I held Green. Perhaps she couldn't feel it, but I wanted to keep her steady. She appeared so weary.

Green kept her promise. She sang to me every morning as many times as she could before having to work. Every morning before any mothers could interrupt, she popped my bubble and sang desperately to my gem. Like the first time, my body took shape. Like a real girl, I grew used to having arms and legs, a mouth to smile with, ears to hear music. I felt my eyelashes flutter. I felt my nails grow. I felt my consciousness go from some floating, intangible entity to a fixed point, staring forward, looking at Green.

But no matter what she gave, I never stuck. My soul went catapulting back to the land of the dead, leaving us both scattered against the floor. Her flowers died, one by one, drying up and landing upon her shoulders. She was too busy to brush them away.

I hated to see her like that.

One morning, she came the closest. She had collected nearly all of me and sealed it into my gem, but still, there was one part that stayed rooted. Its claws had gripped so harshly, Green would have to rip them out, bleed the ether, and resurrect its blood with me.

She passed the day exhausted and went home crying. I hadn't seen her so close to giving up before, but I had felt it, the resignation in her bones as she lay like a ragdoll upon her bed. She fell like a sack of broken limbs, and like broken limbs, didn't move.

She didn't catch Mother at the door. Her coronation would take place in days, and as such, Mother had come to check on her but lingered in the threshold.

"Green?" she called, voice soft.

Green kept crying.

"What's wrong?" Mother sat at the edge of her bed. She placed her hand upon her flower-barren crown. "Why are you crying?"

There must have been so much Green wished to say—the truth, its forks and twisting roads, but she wouldn't have believed it. She hadn't the first time. Instead Green's mouth made a series of damp shapes, an attempt that conveyed nothing.

"I know," Mother said. "You've had to do so much preparation, more than you're used to. The flowers are falling out of your hair early, and you've developed bags beneath your eyes, like Blue's."

Green rolled over. She had stopped crying.

"I want to hear your speech. Since you're probably not feeling up to it, I'll even let you do it laying down, but I need you to recite it."

"I guess there's no getting out of it, huh?"

"Not a chance."

Green took a breath. She spoke each word in the right order, despite her voice sounding wet and tired. Mother sat and listened, her hand upon Green's shoulder. She didn't speak until she had finished, stamping a hard kiss on her forehead.

"I'd like you to say it with more feeling when you're on stage, but I'm not worried. You've clearly practiced." Mother stood to leave.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"Do you have to go just yet?"

"I do." She came back. "But if I stay a while longer, no one is allowed to complain. I'm _their_ Diamond, after all."

Mother ran her fingers through Green's silver hair.

I stood by and watched, swearing she would kiss my forehead the same way.


	24. Chapter 24

That evening, Green lay alone in her bed. My Pearls couldn't accompany her because she had wanted my presence to be a surprise. She meant to reveal this new power when she brought me to Mother—a ribbon tied around my head, hand-holding with Green. Not that it would have mattered. No one else was inside the palace, so no one comforted her as she cried into her pillow.

There were only days between that moment and her coronation, yet she sat crying over me.

I waited for her to sleep before slipping into her ear. She wept even in her dreams, laying against a building, gems stopping to look at us.

"I don't think I can do this, Stars." She smeared her face, trying to wipe her eyes. Her makeup welled, forming inkblots by its own logic. "You just—you're so big and it takes everything out of me. Maybe there's a way to do it, but I wanted you to be here for my coronation—I wanted to show Mom that just because I'm not good at the things she wants me to be doesn't mean I'm a total loser, but maybe I am—"

On one of the screens near the palace appeared the new Diamond insignia—all three Diamonds meeting with her spot in the middle. A musical jingle played, alerting everyone's attention as a voice announced, "Please welcome Green the Loser to the Diamond Authority!"

She began to cry harder.

"Green, shut up. You're not a loser."

She blinked, slowly, mascara having melted her lashes together. She looked gross. "I'm not?"

"_No_."

She wiped her eyes, more carefully this time. "Can you imagine how happy Mom would be? She'd swell with pride, watching me become a part of the authority with you sitting next to her. She wouldn't regret having me at all."

"_Green_, how could you say that?"

The screens and panels of buildings flashing to life showed Mother scowling. While some showed Green younger, apologizing, having broken a piece of furniture, having blown up a beaker at her laboratory, showing Mother where her hand had caught fire. Mother's eyes rolled in exasperation. She would take Green by the wrist to go solve the problem.

"We can't change who Mother is, but I know she loves you. If it's so important to have me back, you should do it for you."

"Yeah," Green said. "I guess I just always imagined you there, sitting with Mom."

I sighed. "Why don't we ask White for help?"

"_What?_"

"_Trying to bring me back—_" I waved my arm around, more aggressively than I intended. "It's too much to ask of one gem, and hearing you talk about the coronation—I want to be there too. It feels like I should be."

"Is that really okay, Stars?"

"Yes! Don't ask me again or I might change my mind. Just bring me back already!"

She hugged me. Every panel and window of every building filled with a big pink heart. She dreamt of her gems cheering. "I'll talk to her tomorrow. I promise. We'll bring you back."

"Thanks," I said, and left her.

I went to talk to White that evening. She was still up, of course. None of the other Diamonds slept as often as Green, which isn't to say that White was doing anything either. She lingered beneath the shadows, burning away their tendrils, sitting still. She was so good at it too—poised perfectly on the sofa of a nondescript salon. She managed not to move, a mannequin set before pristine windows with curtains I had previously torn apart. She had replaced them. Their former smooth grey color had been changed out for a dusty hue and rippling texture.

I tried waving them at her. My hand phased through, over and over again. Sometimes it was easier—I could grasp something at just the right angle the first time. Books were easy. The limbs of dolls. The handle of a tea kettle. But curtains were hard, especially the smooth texture of the ones in White's palace. I longed for some chains to rattle.

With enough effort, I caused them to flap open once. They rustled, but I couldn't get her to look, so I moved on.

I tried squeaking across the glass table before her—the same one that Green had fingerprinted and pockmarked with her former baby hands. I had heard them screeching across it, her chubby palms catching upon the uncompromising glass.

My hands were too smooth. Whenever I thought I had found some traction, they would phase straight through, soundless as I slid onto the floor, cursing.

I tried dragging my nails across the wall, slamming the doors, fluttering the rug. I had made the walls cry and the door creak and the rug flap, but she didn't notice. Hollering, I laid myself flat and still as White Diamond was. There I waited, having drained myself of energy, as one of Homeworld's moons passed within the window. It transitioned through the sky until the sun rose and the darkness lightened, and it was then that White closed her eyes.

She blinked every once in a while, but she finally let them shut. Her aura, always bright and a little painful, dulled, her light once again ebbing above her gem.

She thought of me. Rather than run from her light as it enveloped me, I allowed it to pull me in. It felt cold upon my skin, yet warm along my insides. Perhaps I was nervous. The heart she imagined for me must have been racing, warming my cheeks in the fresh snow of her light show.

When I opened my eyes, I was walking down stairs. My heels clicked, like Mother's would. She walked me perfectly in them, descending smoothly as a couple Pearls passed. They weren't mine, both in uniform with two identical gems faceted upon their foreheads. "Have a nice day, My Diamond," they said in unison.

White stopped me at the entrance of a kitchen she had created for us, where cups of tea sat upon the counter, even though she had no kitchen and I had never once seen her drink. She had set this up for me, perhaps believing it would be to my liking.

"Starlight."

We had caught each other's eyes thousands of times, when I had been sent flying back to her chambers, when she had found me trying to toss books at her, when she had called me and I refused to answer because she had done things all the Diamonds had done.

Despite everything, she persisted when Mother hadn't.

"You look different."

"It's me this time," I said. "I came to talk."

"About what, dear? Surely everything is fine with your upcoming coronation—"

"No, listen. Green needs your help. She can't bring me back alone."

The kitchen lost some of its light. The corners, where their exact meeting points had blurred within the glow, became defined and punched into place. Shadows that she had bleached away relaxed back into their natural spaces, leaning from the edge of the teacup and onto the table, resting from the chairs and cabinets and even beneath White's feet. I had no shadows. I was still a ghost. My body shaped itself like a woman's and, having eaten its faux military uniform, was decorated by the deep abyss of space. I was everything outside of Homeworld, the ether, the nothing, the starlight. Only my head stayed. I saw it within her eyes—my short blond hair and my skin, glowing softly like hers.

White stared as though I belonged to her. I couldn't take that. Her words kick-started with a stammer. "I—I thought you didn't want me to."

"There's no other choice. I don't support what you did to my Pearls—to a lot of gems—but you brought most of them back."

She wouldn't stop looking.

"I hated you for a long time because you shattered me. I can cite other reasons, but that was most of it. I think it was comforting to have someone to blame. I don't know how I'm going to feel when I come back. I don't know if I can love you, but I don't want to be angry any longer. I want to have gems and help them. I want to be a part of it—of Homeworld. Like it or not, that includes you. So I want to forgive you, for my own sake."

She held her teacup in both hands. Finally, she glanced away. "I couldn't shatter anyone after I had lost you. It was too painful. Not that I had really had any opportunity. I couldn't leave this place. I had tried, but the way Yellow was when I tried to conduct business—she wouldn't look at me. Sometimes Blue couldn't either, knowing how much Yellow was hurting." She set her teacup down. "If having you back means that I never shatter another gem again, then that's fine. I don't need to."

"Thank you," I said.

"No, Starlight. I only hope that you'll allow me to love you when you come back, even if it takes time. That's all I've wanted. I'm sorry to have ruined that."

"Yeah—" my voice faltered. "I'm sorry too." My vision blurred and I stepped back from the kitchen door, disappearing from her dream. She let me go more easily than I thought she would, the last frames of her face ending with a promise. _I'll talk to Green_, she said.

I landed upon the floor, through the glass table, across from her. She was crying and so was I, neither one of us screwing up our faces to sob. Perhaps we cried each other's tears—something I left with her and she left with me. There was a degree of separation in sharing the same head space.


	25. Chapter 25

I found Green in her glass house that morning. She sat at one of her laboratory tables, my shards hovering before her. Pearls were at work in the garden. It was still early. None of the Peridots had arrived, and the giants hadn't woken up, but they had gathered stray bulbs that had fallen onto the soil during the night. My Pearls had dressed in uniforms—green jumpsuits that would protect them from the clawed branches of trees. Green had given them baskets as well—large empty drums they strapped to their stomachs, filling them with bright yellow orbs. They looked like a herd of little mothers, carrying baskets of eggs.

I wished to chat with them. Sometimes a loud round of laughter echoed through the glass but no matter what I would say to them, they couldn't hear me. My ghost didn't have enough energy for all of them.

I prayed I would soon.

Rather than wallow, I draped myself around Green. She looked tired, Blue's bags appearing beneath her own eyes.

"We couldn't have put my pieces together without you," I told her.

She cupped her bubble. Whether consciously or otherwise, I wanted to think that some part of her heard me. My gem, its faults fully visible, sparkled like hers did. She held me close to her heart.

"We're going to bring you back, Stars." She rose, I imagine to take me to White. I took her spot on the chair, facing my Pearls. Another round of laughter made it to us as she stood at the door. I watched her for a moment too. She inhaled, exhaled, bounced between both feet. "We're going to do it. We're—"

The glass house's front door slammed. It came from the warp, and within the hallway leading to both the garden and the laboratory stomped Mother.

My pearls hid from her. Dressed in green and with their heads covered in flowers, they blended in, though Mother didn't pay them any mind. She was hyperventilating, hands shaking, holding back tears as she found Green.

Green had hidden my gem behind her back, but still whispered. "Shit, shit, shit—" putting on a smile when Mother entered. "Hey Mom—is everything okay?"

"No—" She stopped before Green, catching her breath. "I went to clean Starlight's shards this morning, but they weren't there. Have you seen them?"

"They weren't there? What do you mean?"

"_I mean they weren't there!_ Someone must have taken them! Do you have any idea who could have done this?"

A white light emerged on the floor behind Green's feet. It gathered, building up until it could produce an arm, shooting up and taking my bubble through its portal. White must have known Mother was looking.

I tried to stay a little longer. I didn't want to leave them, but sooner or later, I wouldn't have a choice. Still, I stood by as Green held Mother's arms. "Don't panic," she said, "We'll find her—"

"I asked Blue but she had no idea, and now you don't know. No one has access to the palace but _us_."

"Did you put them somewhere?"

"No—I never move them, Green. Why would I?" Her breath grew more uneven. "I'll just ask someone else—"

"Mom, it'll be okay. Why don't we go back to the palace and look for her shards? They couldn't have gotten far."

"You're busy—" Yellow said. "I'll go look by myself."

"Okay. Call me if you need help."

Yellow left and Green hurried to warp to White. She had already popped my bubble and laid my gem upon the carpet. I felt its threads against my facets, vibrating by White warming up the keys.

My ghost followed Mother as the blank space within its forehead felt the music room door slam. I stood by as Mother revisited my altar, moving our picture frames, checking beneath my gloves, combing through the floor as frequencies of Green and White's voices vibrated through it.

_Quickly! Let's sing!_

The notes passed through my gem as I sat with Mother in the main room. I tried to touch her upon the shoulder to comfort her, but her aura had become a lightning storm of panic. Then their music began. Even from my position within the palace, my light transferred. I felt it first within my feet, my dust particles transferring to photons from the toes upward. There was the familiar sensation of Green's voice weaving my atoms into place. It bobbed and dipped like a needle, aided by White's effortless stitching. Her higher pitches set me with shapely arms, with long lashes like hers, with blank pupils radiating light. Green decorated me with flowers. They sprouted as my skull maintained its shape, grown over with a layer of light blond hair. White set my constitution and Green reinforced it. She embroidered the details—my little shadows, the smoothness of my lips, my chapping knees upon the carpet, how it felt soft within my hands.

I had feet to put in the sand of a beach. I had hands to hold. I had arms to hug Green. I had lips to kiss Mother's cheek.

The last drops of my consciousness bled through the floor. It witnessed Mother collapsing against the couch, calling White. Her communicator rang and rang, but White didn't respond; she was singing my bones into place. Mother left a message. "White, I need your help. I can't find Starlight's shards—" Her face crinkled. She put her hand upon her throat to choke away the tears. "I'm going to try calling you again, but if you don't answer, I'm coming over."

I saw the inside of the music room. Mother hung up and called again as I heard the final notes of the song, the dip in pitch before they soared. White's communicator continued to ring in the background. Mother's rang. White's rang. Mother's rang. White's rang. My weight settled into the floor, held totally by gravity. White's rang. I sat back, skin made itchy by the clean, starchy carpet. My first breath filled my body. I took several more. White's communicator rang. It rang and rang.

"_Stars!_"

I turned to Green and White. I took another breath. So did they. They were holding each other, White's nails puncturing Green's arm. She didn't cry even as droplets of her syrupy blood pooled into her elbow. The air smelled like dust and soil. Green smelled of her plants. Both of them were staring, too afraid to touch me. I was dewy with new light—with White's glow and Green's flowers. Maybe if they held me, I would fall apart. I was scared of that too.

The door slammed open behind me.

"White, please—you have to help me find Starli—"

Mother stepped inside. Her eyes went wide, filled with me and some of Green and some of White. She stopped midway into a gasp. I stood. My legs were new and clumsy, but I stood.

"M—"

She came to me. Mother touched my arm to check if I was real, smelling of ozone and tears, but that couldn't just be her.

"Mm…"

Once her hands didn't phase through, she held me. She pressed the air between us away, squeezing me until I could hardly breathe. She stopped to check if I was truly her daughter. Once she saw that I was, she held me again. She kissed my cheeks. She grabbed the back of my head to clutch me closer. She made me feel small.

"_It's you_—"

"Mom," I said.

"_Starlight._"

Finally, I held her. I remained as long as she let me.


	26. Chapter 26

I sat next to Mother during Green's ceremony. In the back of the auditorium I held her hand, and she let me.

Mother had helped me dress. I blush to think of the burden I caused, but she didn't seem to mind, showing me gowns in pale gold.

She didn't disagree when I asked if I could wear black. I had tried that gold before, so mild that my glow exposes my faults through it. Her gems, _any_ gems, stare at me wherever I go. I don't like them looking at my scars.

To hide them, I cover myself head to toe. My crown is cylindrical, which I wrap in fabric, hiding my neck. A shame. I love my long, elegant neck, but one of my worst scars is there, a crack leading behind my ear. It shows on my face, nearly covered but escaping onto my cheek like the root of an incorrigible tree.

I pointlessly try to cover it as Green takes the stage. We stand for the anthem. She sings. Her voice has the same effect as when she rose me from the dead. My heart pines toward her, and I squeeze Mother's hand. She squeezes it back.

The flowers in Green's hair, which I had wilted, gained life. I can feel the blooms in my hair reacting beneath my crown. They're tickled to hear her, dancing in the dark of my cap.

White, furthest from me, clasps her hand over her heart. After much convincing from Green, she attended, and the sparkling parts of her outfit blind me whenever she so much as breathes. Something swells in me, but I try not to hate her. I remind myself that I must do the same at certain angles.

Green gives her speech. "I am not like the other Diamonds," she says, and mentions her birth. "But I will serve my gems and Homeworld." I decide that her purpose is also mine.

White places a garland of flowers around Green's neck. The gems in attendance cheer. We go home after they unveil the new authority crest with Green's color in the middle.

Mother says one day I'll properly join the authority. She says this as I cuddle her, making her slightly uncomfortable. I'm grateful she tolerates it.

In years, I'm older than Green. I am enormous, almost as large as White, yet I cry at night. Even with my Pearls to comfort me, I weep, so Mother holds me when she can. She's sharp at many angles, but I forgive her, and she doesn't hurt me. She's comically gentle, as if a harsh word would pop my gem to pieces.

Blue does too, as she teaches me to read. She's so encouraging I want to laugh, but I can understand why. My first days back, I stumbled like a newborn on my long, unforgiving legs. Now I stumble over words Green could read at a few centuries old, but Blue doesn't chide me. She seems not to regard me as an accident any longer. I forgive her for ignoring me as an infant.

I leave my lessons with her to find Green waiting for me outside the library. She embraces me with no fear of knocking me apart. Indeed, my limbs are intact even as she crushes my spine.

In my room, in her palace, surrounded by my Pearls, she calls me 'Stars.' The items she no longer needs are scattered about, as well as gifts from White. They piled my room with sketchbooks whose first few pages are filled with Pearl figurines, sometimes missing an arm or a leg; with brand new floating keys; with books Green had used to learn to read stacked on a shelf White provided; with the voicebox who would read stories for me and the tapes White found for it. New gifts would appear every other day. Between sorting them, we turn on the lamp she made for me and sing to the flowers in my hair. Their long, pointed petals grow longer, as do the blooms in my pearls' hair. We talk. I tell her I can still see ghosts and I want to help them. She says we will.

She convinces me to sing too. Like everything else, it's not as easy as it looks.

My voice, much lower than hers, won't cooperate. It springs too high, cracks, pops. Like Blue, she's gentle, encouraging me to try again.

I want to demonstrate the things I'm learning from White. Once a cycle, we have lessons together, and she takes me from the bottom of my range to the top, where my voice grows shrill and falters. She says, eyes wide, that I sound best when I sing low, that my voice lives there, and such a thing is extremely rare.

It's hard for me to believe her. Whenever we come into contact, she stares. Even my first trip to the beach was punctuated by her glaring like a beacon as I dove into the water. She apologizes. She apologizes for everything. She says she wants to be my mother.

I'm not ready to let her, yet I come to our lessons with more gems Green assembles. She gathers them from various courts, adheres them together, and sends them to me. I hold them in my hands as I try singing them back to life, but in showing me how, White beats me to it. She raises her effortless voice, and the gem appears within my hands, flowers blooming from her head.

White keeps waiting for me to forgive her. Every time a freshly flustered gem appears within my grasp, she stares as she always does. She quietly awaits my approval, locking her fingers together over her lap. I thank her, but I can't forget about the Ruined Pearl. I can't forget about the gems she's killed. I still see them in the street. Green assures me she's working on a serum; one that can regrow missing pieces. I start to doubt it, but I remember that Green grew, that I grew, that she saved me, that we're here, together. I thought I never would be.

I don't want to call the '"Ruined" Pearl ruined any longer. None of us are ruined. I'm determined to heal her. I'm determined to help all gems like her, and perhaps on the day that I bring that Pearl back is the day that I forgive White.


	27. Author's Notes and Personality Quiz

Hey guys, I want to thank all of you who made it to this point of the story. Whenever I post something with original characters, I can never be certain if anyone will bother reading it. I think the reason is twofold: the first being that people seek fanfiction to experience new sides of their favorite characters (so why would they want to read an amateur project starring strangers?) and secondly, original characters have the stigma, perhaps not unrightfully so, of being "cringey" or "too self indulgent." I'm not sure where mine fall. I'd love to believe that they're not cringey, but they are undeniably self-indulgent, which is why I appreciate all of you for enabling me. I can't thank you enough for all of your kind words, reactions, theories, kudos, favorites, or any other forms of interaction I missed. I will cherish your comments forever.

A few people have asked me if Court of Ghosts will get a sequel, and it will. I actually have a few short stories ready and am currently working on a longer piece, but it will take a while. How I produce all of my fanfictions is that I write the entire story first, let it sit so I can approach it with fresh eyes, reread it, make a few edits, send it to my beta readers, make more edits, reread it again, reread it out loud with silly voice-acting, and then finally, (maybe after one more reread) post one chapter per week. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time, but I do it to ensure the best quality. With that in mind, the next 3 installments of this series come in a set, so I can't post story 3 until 5 is done. Parts 3, 4, and 5 need to be harmonious with one another (I would be mortified to find even a small contradiction, which is a possibility when working across even 2 stories.) so, just like with the real Steven Universe, you'll have to be patient. (I am so sorry.)

That said, I made this very silly quiz (with picture results drawn by yours truly in MS Paint.) You can take it to find out which Court of Ghosts character you are. I hope this (kind of) tides anyone over who is waiting for the next installment, and that you get a few laughs out of it. As always, I would love to hear what you think. If you take it, feel free to comment which character you got.

It's on /quiz/**11954334/Which-Court-of-Ghosts-Character-are-you**

When I do finally post the next installment, I'll likely update with an announcement on this story, so if that's something you're interested in, please subscribe. (Or if you like me enough, you can subscribe to my author page, thank you very much!) If not, thank you for the time you've taken to read a part or the whole of this story. You guys have made me feel very special and I hope to have more content for you as soon as possible, even though it will probably take months. Just know that I'm working hard in the background. Thank you all again!


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